


if love sits on your heart like stone

by winchesterloved (allforsammy)



Series: Touchstone!Verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, BAMF Dean Winchester, BAMF Sam Winchester, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Samulet Fix-It, Self-Harm, gencest, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-04 20:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4152621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allforsammy/pseuds/winchesterloved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Swan Song AU: If Dean can’t be sure of anything else in the world, he can be sure of this - he was made for Sam. Made to take care of him, protect him, look after him. If Sam is gone, then there is no purpose to his existence. If Sam is gone, there is only one course of action - get Sam back. This is the journey of Sam and Dean finding their way back to each other, driving down the highway, saving people, hunting things.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>On the fifth day, Dean goes mute.</i><br/> <br/>  <i>It’s not the first time it has happened, but this time it’s different. It’s not out of self-preservation, afraid to lose the last piece he’s got of himself, like when his Mom died, and it’s not because he’s been swallowing all the words back after realizing there was no one left to listen to him, like when Sammy left for school. But he turns mute anyway, because Sam’s gone and he’s taken all of Dean’s words with him.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. if you are unreachable

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a self-indulgent fic full of all the fix-its a brothers fan could possibly want. Featuring seedy motels, the Impala and the highway, stargazing, BAMF!Winchesters, needy boys, soul-bonding and a ton of there-is-no-such-thing-as-personal-space brother touching.

** if love sits on your heart like stone (1/5) **

**_if you are unreachable_ **

On the fifth day, Dean goes mute.

It’s not the first time it has happened, but this time it’s different. It’s not out of self-preservation, afraid to lose the last piece he’s got of himself, like when his Mom died, and it’s not because he’s been swallowing all the words back after realizing there was no one left to listen to him, like when Sammy left for school. But he turns mute anyway, because Sam’s gone and he’s taken all of Dean’s words with him.

Eight days later, Dean breaks his promise to Sam for the first time.

He tries, he really does – tells himself it’s just like Stanford, four years will have blown past before he knows it, but it isn’t, and not even a minute has blown past when he realizes he’s screwing up whatever it is he’s trying to do. To be fair, Sam is an idiot if he ever thought Dean was just going to find a woman with a kid and just start living an apple-pie life like his brother isn’t stuck somewhere with the Devil and a douchey archangel. But then again, they’re still in the slow process of finally understanding the depth of their bond. He figures he can probably forgive Sam for being a little slow on the uptake.

All the same, the result is that after thirteen days of hideous grimace-smiles and pleasantly morbid daydreams of his trusty .45 misfiring (and far less pleasant nightmares of Sam stuck in the Cage), he leaves Lisa’s place, and hightails it out of Illinois. It’s a bit more difficult than it would have been, because for some reason, Lisa has gotten it into her head that Dean is suicidal, and watches him like a hawk. Thing is, Dean is nothing if not trained from pretty much age five onwards by a battle-hardened ex-Marine, so hawk or not, stealth serves him well.

Halfway out of the state, he has to admit that Sam is a fairly wise idiot, if inarguably an idiot, because short of going back to Lisa, he has no idea what to do with himself.

It doesn’t take long, though - there’s always been one similarity between him and Sammy, one thing carved into their DNA - and that’s the unmistakable, unwavering, driven need of ‘ _find my brother, find my brother, find my brother_ ’, when either one of them is gone, dead. It’s the tattooing of a relentless beat against his eardrums, the one battle-cry he can register, bright and painful and always there - until it’s flowing, rushing through his veins, consuming all his senses until the only thing that makes sense is _Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sam Sammy Sam Sam-_

\---

It gets easier after that.

Sort of. Not really. It doesn’t ever get easier, that’s what he’s starting to realize. He’s always known that, recognized that that block of void within him would only stay, stagnant and never healing, until he got his brother back - but he’d never quite gotten around to experiencing it.

Sam has, he knows. Six months in Broward County, six months that he never mentioned after that one time he broke down and babbled half-coherently about not being able to do it, hands scrabbling at Dean and squeezing so tight he thought he might break a bone - and then four months. When he was in Hell.

Research doesn’t bore him anymore, simply frustrates him ( _because there’s nothing, there’s nothing you can do, Dean, there’s nothing you can ever do_ ) and he shoves at it, shoves it down as it bubbles up in his throat as a half-formed scream, shoves it down because he has no time for tantrums - _Sam_ has no time - and continues looking.

Lisa calls, sometimes. He didn’t pick up the first time, let it go to voicemail, and listened afterwards. Her voice is warm and concerned and something else - _angry_ , he thinks, listening. _Angry but trying not to be._ It’s okay. Once he gets Sammy back, everything will fall into place, he just needs - he just needs Sam back.

But as she ends the message, her voice is just quiet, understanding almost. “You don’t have to say anything, Dean. I know -” She breaks off, because _no,_ she doesn’t know. Not really. John knows how Dean stopped speaking after Mary died, but nobody knows that it was Sammy who gave him his voice back, babbling and pulling at Dean’s arms and staring up at him with those puppy eyes, wondering why Dean was silent.

“Just let us know you’re okay,” she finally says, sigh in her voice that’s part concern, part helplessness.

That? That he can do. Lying he does incredibly well - even without a voice. So he picks the phone up when she calls, rifling through books centuries old, and just... breathes.

It lasts for a moment, and then like an alarm clock right on time, he remembers that breathing is something Sam isn’t allowed to do anymore, that it’s a luxury not shared between them, a luxury that he doesn’t deserve, not alone - so he hangs up before he can choke audibly on nothing, texts “im ok” one-handedly into the phone, and hits send. It’s not difficult to push everyone to the back of his mind, far seconds and thirds and fourths and fifths from that one goal he has, up to and including the woman he loves, whether or not he’s in love with her. It should scare him, and it does at first, a little, when he’s lying on the bed trying to catch just enough sleep to be attentive in the morning - but everything fades and falls away from the voice in his head constantly chanting “find Sam, find Sam, find Sam”.

Nothing scares him quite as much as having his little brother gone, ripped away from him - on this earth anyway - and with that less a fear than a reality, nothing quite scares him anymore.

\---

He finds it in a bland, thin book - more a pamphlet than a book, really, and he’d have thrown it aside if the words hadn’t popped up, red and bloody in his sleep-blurry eyes, and immediately jarred him from the lull of sleep.

He’s already tried a dozen formulas and spells - some incredibly dangerous and risky - but none of them have worked. He hadn’t expected them to work either, blind shots in the dark more than anything else. This - _this_ , however... this is blood magic, and he feels the thump of his heart quickening in anticipation as he’s suddenly wide awake, scanning through the entire spell work, eyes catching on the same words: blood, brother, soul, binding.

It doesn’t require much, at least not as far as variety goes - a few herbs, holy oil and holy water, some Latin incantations, and a couple quarts of blood.

He ignores the tiny voice in his head telling him to find Bobby or Cas, just in case this goes wrong, and in case Sam’s soul isn’t enough to replenish the blood supply in his body. If either of them hears a word of this, there’ll be no getting to actually doing it, and he can’t have that, can’t risk his brother’s life for his own safety. This is something he has to do, and if he has to do it on his own to actually accomplish it, he will.

It doesn’t take long for him to get everything he needs, and then he strips down to his boxers - no sense in getting his clothes bloody if he doesn’t have to; blood is a bitch to scrub out - knife in hand, and starts the incantation.

He doesn’t pretend to understand the logic of blood magic, and he’s long past the point of actually _trying_ , so when the pamphlet says to collect equal amounts of blood from each of the major arteries, he just prepares enough cloth to stop the bleeding, decides on the most efficient way to go about doing them, and slices right in. Perhaps for the first time he’s grateful for the forty years he spent in Hell, because locating those vessels and cutting them just enough and cleanly to get a good crimson spray into the plastic cups? That’s all child’s play to him.

Or it is, until he remembers that working with a good deal of blood loss makes for a good deal of clumsiness, and his hands are slippery with blood. He’s down to the last artery, squinting at the incantation and at his thigh alternately, trying to maneuver himself into a position to finish it up. The motel room grows dim, grey - and he’s seeing blood splattered everywhere he turns when he realises he’s losing consciousness. Panic shoots straight to his head, sends adrenaline pumping through his veins, and before he knows it, he’s plunged his trusty knife into his thigh, impatiently waiting for the cup to fill up, bubbling up like a morbid likeness of soda, except red and painful.

And then black.

\---

He wakes up feeling like he’s lost more than two quarts of blood, which he probably has, given that he wasn’t awake to put any pressure on his artery. But he wakes up, which doesn’t make sense, at least not until a gravelly voice jerks him out of his thoughts.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Dean.”

Past the initial surprise, he can’t dredge up anything but despair in the face of his failure, so he just continues to stare up at the ceiling.

“I was very nearly too late to do anything.”

_If only_ , Dean thinks.

The familiar trenchcoat moves into his line of sight. “Sam would not have wanted this for you,” Castiel says. “He sent you to Lisa and Ben. It was his dying wish.”

It doesn’t make any sense at all, Dean is certain. It makes no sense whatsoever. Why is Castiel so invested in Sam’s dying wish now? Why does _i_ care what Sam wanted when he isn’t even _there_ to want anything anymore? What Sam wants, right now, is to get the fucking hell out of the Cage. And Dean can’t even give him that.

“I couldn’t replenish your blood supply,” Castiel starts speaking again. “I... didn’t remove the scars.”

There’s a pause, like he’s waiting for Dean to say something. Like Dean should give a damn about goddamned scars when his brother’s trapped in a cage. In Hell.

“I promised Sam to keep you out of trouble, Dean. I have to try.”

_He has to try_ , Dean thinks, and if he weren’t so fucking exhausted he might laugh. Cas isn’t just _wrong_ , if he thinks keeping Dean out of trouble matters to Sam at all right now - he’s abso-fucking-lutely deluded. There was no room for thought beyond _stop_ and _please_ and _no_ in Hell and he doesn’t fancy the Cage is filled with party and booze either. Sam doesn’t care. Sam is in the Cage, and all that matters is that Dean gets him out.

Castiel sighs, like Dean is a disappointment and a burden rolled into one. Nothing new. “I need to get back to Heaven,” he says. “Dean, I need you to promise me. You can’t try to get Sam out again.”

And there it is. People trying to get him to do the impossible, trying to get him to stop trying to find Sam. They don’t get it - don’t get that it’s hardwired into his brain, into his heart, into his _soul_. It’s everything in him scrabbling for anchor, for purpose, for _life_ \- it’s survival instinct, it’s gasping for air, it’s _all. He. Has._ And he’s not going to stop, he can’t, and he _won’t_.

Cas seems to get it, because the next moment he’s nodding and reaching in -

\---

_Dean’s caught impetigo from Sammy - it’s not the first time he’s gotten infected by something through Sam, or the other way round. I put the boys in separate rooms and locked the doors, hell if I know how Dean got through those locks to get to Sammy with me researching in Sam’s room. He swears he didn’t do it, and if he’s lying he’s gotten scary good at it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they shared more than just blood. Every time one of them gets hungry, the other starts complaining not half an hour later. When Dean or Sam is in a bad mood, the other starts acting up, and just because Dean tries to hide it doesn’t mean I don’t catch it when he’s close to tears because Sammy’s fretting._

_“Daddy,” the whine is long in the second syllable, drawn out around unhappy, pouting lips. “I’m hungry...”_

_John frowns, instantly irritated, and barks out to Dean, holed in the corner of the backseat, arms loosely around Sammy. “I thought I told you to make sure he had breakfast, Dean.”_

_At thirteen, easing into puberty and perpetually hungry, Dean is still growing into his too-wide eyes, shooting up to John’s height, only the daily relentless training preventing the teenage gawkiness from taking over. He shifts, looking at John from the rearview mirror. “I did, sir.” A low growl from his stomach punctuates the end of his sentence, and a blush rises on his cheeks, embarrassment only to turn to fond exasperation when Sam turns around in Dean’s arms, giggling, and starts poking at Dean’s stomach._

_“Hey no - Sammy,_ no _, stop it, you little bitch -”_

_At the next rest stop, John stops for an early lunch, watches Dean wolf down two meals, and tries not to notice that Sam is barely eating, for all his whining in the car._

\---

_Beaumont Police Department_ stands out starkly in navy, accusing.

Beside him, Castiel sighs. “They can’t see us yet. I didn’t want to do this,” he says, and sounds genuinely apologetic. “I cannot afford to watch you all the time, Dean. My brothers and sisters need me, back home.” He cocks his head, looking upward briefly as though he could hear Heaven through the gesture. “I’m sorry, Dean. Take care.”

There’s a flutter of wings, as always, and then all descends to chaos.

It takes roughly twenty-four hours of questioning, testing, and paperwork before they finally accept him into their fold as Dean Winchester, born January 24, 1979, serial murderer and grave desecrator. Well, not really - for one, Dean does not participate in the questioning, and _accepting him into their fold_ is not quite the phrase for what they do to him.

_Imprisonment_ is infinitely closer.

\---

If the prisoners previously harbored any illusions as to the hierarchy within the prison, one look at Dean Winchester is enough to squash them into nothingness. It’s not the height, or the obviously powerful physique. Among wolves, Dean Winchester is alpha, and one look into his eyes is enough to send chills down the most vicious murderer’s spine.

Because Dean Winchester has seen Hell, and he is not hiding it. More than that - he is finally, finally, honest-to-God, _livid_.

\---

Agent Roger McCarthy receives his task 7AM, the first thing when he steps into his office. Dean Winchester, twice declared deceased, has returned from the dead. But more than that - he has turned himself in, and his report is not the least bit vague in stating that he has not said a single word since being taken into custody.

Dean Winchester. Serial killer. Grave desecrator. Two-time escapee from prison. Credit card fraud. Impersonation of federal officers. The list goes on, long - and if he has been alive for two full years since last declared dead, getting longer.

The prisoner sits, limbs loose, stance deceptively relaxed. His eyes are angled downward, but there is no defeat or humility in the posture. From the reports, two-years-old and barely a day-new, one thing is certain: Dean Winchester is a dangerous man. The footage they have of him shows him cocksure and cheeky, only too-old eyes belying his brash demeanor. If he was hiding the darkness in him, he isn’t now, and the difference - even ignoring sharpened, hardened angles to his face - is startling.

His eyes are still shadowed, his head bowed in what appears to be devious contemplation, when McCarthy steps in and sits down across the prisoner. His wrists and ankles are shackled, seemingly absurd precaution for all the attention he gives to the fact. And then he looks up.

There is no arrogant smirk, no dancing eyes, no words. He looks up, and there is only one way to describe him.

This man has seen Hell.

There is no mistaking the almost dismissive hostility in his eyes, dark and wholly disinterested. And yet, dangerous.

McCarthy struggles to fight the shudder that wracks its way through his body. The question is simply this: if Dean Winchester can keep himself out of prison, and there is presently no doubt in his mind that he could for as long as he wanted, why exactly did he turn himself in?

“Mr Winchester,” he begins, and watches for a reaction.

There is none. The prisoner continues to stare, disconcertingly, at him.

“You’re aware of your records,” he says. “You have been declared dead - for all intents and purposes, you could stay free in the world out there - so why did you turn yourself in?”

A verbal reply is, presumably, not in his expectations - but nonetheless, the almost-eerie lack of response is disturbing. Dean continues to stare.

“There is, of course, no reason to doubt that you might wish to... atone for your crimes, Mr Winchester, but -”

Still no reaction. The file pinned Dean as a possible vigilante criminal, with strong ethical beliefs, if somewhat _unconventional_ , but the prisoner that sits before him right now remains unmoved.

“Your file here,” he taps at the inch-thick folder on the desk, “says that you have an... interesting relationship with your brother, Sam Winchester.”

And there. A flicker, and then he shifts - leisurely, unmindful of the way the cuffs and chains around his limbs clank against the chair. It reminds McCarthy of a large cat - smooth and lazy, but deliberate. Deadly.

“Which is why I wonder what happened between the two of you, that you are here, but he is not.”

Dean blinks, still not attentive, but listening.

“Did you have a fight?”

No movement.

“Or is he out there right now, trying to formulate a plan to get you out of this hell -”

Barely a movement, but instantly, McCarthy knows that he has misstepped. Dean is still staring at him, in the exact same posture, but as distinctly as if he had turned bodily away, there is no question that he has shut down, refusing to play.

“My men are watching out for him, you know that.”

Nothing.

The rest of the session is a bust, no different from talking to a rock. McCarthy watches him carefully, prodding less recklessly, trying to gauge reactions, anticipating any minute shifts, but whether it is because of John Winchester’s unfortunately brilliant militaristic training, or simply because Dean Winchester has arbitrarily gone deaf after that one sentence, it’s as if the man has been unplugged, batteries taken out.

\---

The next time he sees Dean Winchester is for misdemeanour. He wears the lone bruise on his cheekbone like a crown and the last rag on a beggar’s frame. The other men - all five of them - look like they have been put through a grinder. Twice. They shrink away from him sullenly, men he has never seen visibly afraid of anything. He looks toward Dean, surprised, and the man has the audacity to crack a smirk.

The brief investigation tells him nothing he hadn’t expected - Winchester was jumped. He reacted.

“He doesn’t belong here,” one of them hisses, eyes nearly crazed. “He’s a whole different breed, he’s barely even _human_.”

It isn’t anything he doesn’t know, but it still chills him to hear it from a cold-blooded murderer. The cocksure smirking young man in the video may not have belonged in a SuperMAX, but even if the paperwork doesn’t agree, this one - silent, deadly, unfathomable - if only out of pure fear of what he might do - this one does. If he had his way, Winchester would have been chopper-transported to a SuperMAX the moment he got here, but the paper work is taking longer than he had hoped. He can only hope an inmate altercation is the worst that happens before he gets him behind bars permanently.

Dean still doesn’t say a single word, but as he’s led away, there is the slightest flicker in his eyes - _frustration_. Slowly but surely, Dean Winchester is fraying, and that - that is just the catalyst McCarthy needs to crack him open.

\---

Or not, because that night, Dean Winchester is rushed into the nearest secure hospital. McCarthy watches him, face pale and almost gaunt, and for the first time sees a lost man rather than a dangerous monster.


	2. then I am insatiable

_eight hours prior_

The sight that greets him when he walks into the room, fettered by chains around his ankles, his wrists, is - to say the least - unexpected. It almost shocks him into speech, but nothing gets past his throat, not even a croak.

“Sit,” is what she says, and he does, sinking onto the chair, confusion and hope fluttering in his chest, making his hands shake.

“I could hear you from the very moment you lost him,” she says, sorrowful, gentle undertones that she has never taken to with him. “It hasn’t stopped since - I hear the grief of people, even across cities, sometimes, when it’s strong, but it always fades.” She looks at him. “Yours hasn’t - it was less loud at times, across states - but it doesn’t stop.”

If that is all Missouri has to say, he can do one better - it _won’t_. He knows it now, knows it as sure as he knows that the waves will continually crash upon the shores, that the sun will rise and set day after day after day, that his world revolves around nothing else but Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.

“You did something in Dayton,” she says next, and this time his eyes startle up to hers. “I can hear him now, Dean, and the things... the things they’re doing to him...”

He does make a noise then, a choked _whimper_ -

“He’s still in there, Dean, but I can hear him - something’s changed with what you did in Dayton. I need to know what it is.”

He tries - he really does, opens his mouth, forms the words between his lips, between his teeth, and - nothing comes out. He’s just about to panic, mind still slow and sluggish from drugs, lagging behind his racing heart, when a hand gently pulls his fingers away from shredding the bedsheets.

She winks at him when he looks up. “Psychic, remember?” The tiniest hint of a smile quirks his lips up, strengthened by hope, and the next moment Missouri is shaking her head at him. “You shouldn’t be messing with blood magic, boy - anything could have happened.” Then - “If the Cage is anything like Hell or Heaven, it doesn’t house physical bodies - it isn’t made to keep them in. Whatever you did must have changed something in the Cage - I think... I think Sam is free to leave, but he wouldn’t know his way back. Where is the amulet?”

And the world goes blank.

\---

_In the end, it’s the same thing that breaks them both._

_“No._ No _. Not him - no, you can’t...”_

_The thing wearing Dean’s body grins and stretches. “Might need a little practice to wear this quite right, Sam,” he says, “But I’ve finally gotten it, haven’t I? I’ve tried flaying you, pulling you apart, burning you up... I’ve tried Jess, Daddy, Madison... even Mommy - but none of them, none of them are quite your precious Dean, are they?” He pulls a sneer, grotesque on Dean’s lips. “Jack. Pot.”_

_Sam shudders and looks anywhere but at him._

_“He tried to take you from me,” Dean’s voice, perfectly resurrected from Sam’s memory, right beside him. He flinches. “Marked your pretty little soul for himself, tried to pull it away. And look what he’s done - I had to lock you in there, in that shell - so breakable - and I can’t play with you anymore, Sam._

_“Well, guess what? Neither can he. When I’m through with you, Sam, big brother’ll be the last person you want touching you.”_

_“No - no, you can’t do this - anything, anything but this, please.”_

_A dark chuckle, Dean’s hand in his hair, breath against his ear. “Anything, hmm? I don’t know, Sammy, do you really want this?”_

_Sam swallows. “Anything - anything you want, just not this. Don’t - just don’t pretend to be Dean. P-please. I’ll do anything else, anything else you want, I swear. Please. Please -”_

_The grip releases. “Shh. Begging so good, Sam,” a mocking facsimile of big brother pride. “You get your way - no big brother for you.” A brand appears in his hand, out of nowhere. “I can make sure of that.”_

\---

“It’s not lost,” Missouri says, when the buzzing in his ears finally stops and fades into a dull hum at the back of head.

He stares.

“You know your brother,” she says. “Better than anyone - now tell me, has Sam ever given up on you?”

 _It was just a piece of metal on a leather cord_ , he wants to say. _It was always meant for Dad; he gave it to me as a second-hand gift._ But air-fresheners on a dingy Christmas tree had said different. Light-hearted banter and dimpled smiles painted over a bleeding heart had said different. Disappointed eyes, yet still filled with so much hope, so much love, so much trust - had said different. _It’s okay, Dean_ \- had said different.

“He didn’t leave the amulet in the trash can.”

Hope rises like a tidal wave, lodges in his throat, too wild, too desperate to be helpful, but he pushes it down, forces his mind to work.

\---

_“Hey, Dean - ”_

_“Yeah?” It comes out gruff, but Sam isn’t even looking at him anymore, staring at the ground where his scuffling foot has cleared out a little patch of smoother, finer dust._

_“Um - my duffel. You can - you can look through it - after, y’know,” and Dean wants to strangle him - for demolishing the wall he’s constructed around Cage and Hell and Sam and_ gone _, but Sam’s sounding like Dean hadn’t fed and clothed and_ bathed _him, like he can’t ask for anything and Dean will move Heaven and Earth to get it for him - “If you want, I mean. Just. Only if you want.”_

\---

 _Sam’s duffel_ , he thinks, raises his eyes to Missouri.

The next time she sees him, two days later - because apparently Missouri has _resources_ \- she reaches out to touch his hand, and he closes his fist around blessed metal.

The ritual is nothing overly complicated, for being the last step to getting Sam out of the Cage. Neither is leaving an opening when the guards aren’t paying attention, enticing enough that the group that’s been eyeing him like a hungry pack decides to jump him. His fists need no encouragement to meet flesh, crack bone.

The jagged cut on his cheek burns like fire, feels like hope.

The rusty nail protruding from his side the night after is a pathetic imitation of Hell at best, but it feels like victory. He grins, turns, faces the serial murderer whose hand is still on the nail, and almost laughs at the look of terrified horror on the man’s face.

And then he passes out.

Or, at least, does a passable imitation of it that the guards are fooled and rush him off on a poorly policed ambulance to the hospital. On one hand - in their defense, it would be absurd to expect a man impaled on an inch-thick nail gushing blood from the hole in his side to knock out three guards, jump off the moving ambulance and hike to the nearest abandoned farmhouse. On the other hand, they have never met a man who’s experienced Hell.

\---

Sam wakes up in a field. To be exact, he wakes up in a cemetery in Kansas, and the first thing he realises is that he’s thirsty. The next thing he realises is that worse ( _and a thousand times better_ ) than the lashes and burns and cuts on his body, his heart is trying to scorch its way out of his ribcage, and more bizarrely than that, towards a specific direction. Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s stumbling away, clawing and crawling his way across the cemetery, and it’s the only thing that eases the burning in his chest.

It isn’t long until it occurs to him that there is method to his madness.

_It’s the strangest feeling, floating away while Lucifer and Michael are watching, hands on his body, eyes on his soul. It feels like warmth and hope and brother, all things that have been stripped away in the Cage - it feels like Dean. It’s probably nothing short of opening up the Cage and letting the Apocalypse happen, and Sam should be angry, should be outraged that Dean is undoing the one good thing he’s ever done, should want Dean to stop - but he can’t not be selfish, and God help him, he had never been able to not want Dean, not need Dean, even when he wanted to, even when he should have let Dean go. And Dean is here, where Sam can feel him like water on a parched soul, and nothing has ever felt more blessed than that._

_It doesn’t last._

_Being yanked back into his own body feels like he’s being uprooted, abandoned, forgotten. And then Lucifer’s hand is on his chest, on his heart, where he has always been Dean’s -_

_\- he screams._

_“I’m sorry, Sam,”_ Lucifer had said. _“Dean isn’t getting you.”_

It’s a promise, not a threat - and Lucifer has never lied to Sam. Less because he isn’t the Father of Lies, more because he makes every precaution possible that a promise becomes reality, and stays it.

Stopping is worse than the wounds on his body scraping across dried grass and stinging with sweat combined. Sam staggers to his feet and starts trudging (crawling) towards the most painful direction he can find.

\---

Sammy, _he thinks, and watches his baby brother drop the blocks in his hand and turn to look at him, dimples flashing. At nearly two, Sammy still barely talks, and Dean has only just started again a couple weeks back on Dad’s insistence, words coming slowly, unnaturally, like he’s maybe losing something with every syllable that comes out of his mouth. Thoughts, on the other hand - thoughts are easy, and even though Dad doesn’t seem to hear him, Sammy does. Hey, c’mere Sammy._

_Sammy’s dimples deepen, and he pushes himself up onto stubby toddler legs, tottering towards Dean._

_Dean’s own smile widens, and when Sam gets close enough, he pulls him onto his lap, holding him safe as he wriggles into a comfortable position. Hungry?_

_Sam doesn’t nod or shake his head, but Dean feels the faint rumbling in his stomach, and reaches over to the grocery bag sitting on the floor beside him._

Sammy _, he thinks, three months later, when Sammy has started forming full sentences, and watches his baby brother flip through a book, enraptured._

\---

Unfortunately, Hell or not, infection is a bitch, and bacteria-infested farmhouses aren’t kind to open wounds, less so to open wounds made by rusty nails. Shock-tremored fingers open up the emergency medical kit swiped from the ambulance, splashing disinfectant liberally over the hole in his side. The next thing he registers is the Impala’s metal beneath his palm, cool from the night air - and she’s lurching down the highway, and Dean has never been more thankful for his Baby, for all that he could barely stand being in the car... _after_.

It feels like his entire life - or non-life, even, because some of the ‘skills’ he’s been using can’t be credited back to John - was only training for this, culminating in the core of his entire being - save Sammy, protect Sammy, find Sammy, be with Sammy.

\---

The wind bites into his bones, seeping through the three layers he has on like they’re not even there. He stumbles onwards blindly, letting his heart tug painfully against his gait, clumsy and uneven. Screw Dean’s rubbish timing, he thinks, because of fucking course his brother just had to raise him from Hell right when it turns really fucking cold. Three layers may be all good in May, but in fucking whatever-month-it-is, he may as well be buck naked. A particularly strong gust rocks him back on the balls of his feet, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t just keel over backwards from the force.

He simply stands there for a moment, wanting nothing more than to curl up and wait for his big brother to come get him - which, thinking of, why shouldn’t he? His knees are already starting to buckle when he remembers.

\---

Dean’s stumbling out of the Impala before the engine even has time to cut off entirely, breath coming in pathetic gasps. His heart is climbing out through his throat, threatening to choke his windpipe. Sammy, he thinks, and in his mind’s eye, he can see the familiar floppy-haired kid, _his_ kid, rounding a gravestone, appearing, right there, close enough to touch - any moment now, _any moment_ and this nightmare will be over, and Sam will be back here, right where he belongs - any moment now. _Sammy_ , is his second thought, closer to a plea now, because he knows Sam, and he knows Sam would know that Dean was coming for him - any second and he’ll feel that hand, once so tiny, closing over his shoulder, behind him, beside him, somewhere, somehow -

 _Maybe he wasn’t raised here_ , is his third - because there are only so few hiding spots in a cemetery that’s nothing more than a field, and Sammy isn’t going to appear randomly from the ground like one of those funny-looking creatures in the desert or whatever, never mind that for five fucking years, those were his favourite animals. The thought forces a laugh out of his throat - a breath punched out, more desperate than amused - and then he sees it.

He shouldn’t be able to recognise Sam’s blood from anyone else’s - but there’s a patch of rusty brown on the gravestone a few feet away, and he knows it as sure as that his heart has reason to beat for no one but his brother - that it’s Sam’s. It’s a bloody, painful trail from the spot that swallowed up his raison d’etre - staining the grass in a way that would never have happened if Sam was doing anything but crawling, dragging himself across the ground. It’s not difficult to follow, not even for an amateur and certainly not for Dean - at least until it leaves one bloody handprint on the flaking white paint of the fence - and disappears.

He’s on the ground before he knows what’s happening, knees buckling and legs giving out like his life has just been ripped out of him. “ _Sammy_ ,” he mouths more than says, breath sucking in quick and hard, and if he thought that insistent swelling and clawing in his heart was bad, it has nothing on the way it feels now, like laceration, like knives, like fire - like his own personal hell.

It’s irrational, is what, because if he had any doubt that Sam wasn’t truly raised from the Cage, it would have been settled by the blood trail Sam’s left behind. The brown under his palm where his hand has found its way to the fence, like it brings him any closer to Sam is plain, hard evidence that he’s done his job, fulfilled his purpose, brought little brother back to life, but it only feels like confusion and hurt and Stanford - it feels like abandonment.

He huffs out a laugh, silent save for the air that whooshes out of his lungs. The sob that comes then is dry, humiliating. He was willing to house Sam’s soul in his own body, put him up in the one place Dean had never shared with anyone, and here Sam was - his first reaction upon getting out of Hell, to run away from Dean, unwilling to leave even a note except in his blood, standing starkly out like accusation, like _you let me die_ , like _you did nothing but hurt me and let me get hurt_ , like _go away and don’t try to find me_.

And now they’re stuck with some sort of complicated, _unwanted_ soul bond, an accident, a burden Sam has to live with.

He laughs again, chest no longer hitching with useless, tearless sobs, and lets his eyes drift listlessly across the field.

The blood trail stands out glaringly under the waning sun, and suddenly, like something’s shifted across his eyes, it’s not screaming _abandonment_ and _unwanted_ anymore, but hurt and baby brother.

Dean pushes up, staggering on legs shaky from exhaustion, and doggedly burns his own trail back to the Impala. Sam needs - maybe not the way Dean does, maybe not ever half as much - but he needs, and Dean has never been able to say no to that.

The Impala tearing down the highway is less driven by desperation this time, determination more than need fuelling her.

\---

There is nothing for it - Sam is, in one word, _miserable_. The rain started God knows how many hours ago. Somehow it’s like the entire water mass in the world has decided to empty itself on fucking godforsaken Montana, and of course it would, because it’s not like whoever the Upstairs Guy is right now doesn’t have a beef with Sam. He should be expecting it by now.

He also really should have hotwired that car instead of deciding to hike this last leg. He doesn’t really know where Dean is - except somewhere to his... southeast, he decides, swiveling on one foot briefly - but even he isn’t _that_ good. He’s known not to underestimate his big brother, but there is still no way Dean can now warp time and catch up with him under the twenty-four hours he’s been hiking, hotwiring cars - even hitching rides. The trucker had pulled his semi up beside Sam, and Sam had barely noticed.

Goodness knows what he’d been thinking, inviting a bloody, limping man into his vehicle, but Dean had always said he looked like a lost puppy, and apparently that worked, because bleeding onto his upholstery, the man still looked more sympathetic than wary. Because Sam looked really unthreatening, the man had all but said, and it was all Sam could do to hold back a snort. Not that he was so inclined, because he really wasn’t a raging psychopath, but half-beaten to Hell or not, he could still kill him easily if he needed to.

A chuckle under his breath, mangled with phlegm and a burning throat. Dean would slap him on the head and dose him with fluids, but Dean isn’t here, is he?

\---

He knows exactly where Sam stopped running on sheer stubbornness, and started covering up the trail he was leaving behind him - more a straight line north than anything else. Tracking through cities is a hassle for a mute, which is currently what he is, because for whatever stupid-ass reason, he still can’t force a single word - a single _syllable_ \- past his lips. But he gets by - by thirteen, he had already mastered that it was less about talking, and more about looking - and looking he does just fine without saying a word. He charms the ones that need to be charmed, garners sympathy from those who have sympathy to offer, and even - on a few occasions - scares the hell out of the ones that need to be scared.

Himself a little too, if he’s being honest - because with his bare hand on the douchebag’s throat, pressing in enough to feel the pulse jackrabbiting under his fingers, there is not a doubt in his mind that he would stop that heart between this very heartbeat and the next if it came down to it. Evidently, the man realises that too and he gets the information he needs, but he leaves with a strange taste in his mouth - knowing that remorse would be the last thing he would feel for ending the life of a man who stood in between him and Sam.

He meets up with Bobby too, if only because Missouri can’t keep her mouth shut, and Bobby’s a hard son of a bitch to refuse to meet up with, voice or no voice.

“You remind me of Sam,” Bobby says, after promising to help keep a lookout for Sam, and his tone is cautious, almost wary. “The way he was after you... after you made your trip downstairs.” He huffs a laugh, and the sound is tired, mirthless. “Remind me of your dad too - just closed up real good, wouldn’t let anyone in,” and Dean looks up at that.

He tries then, tries as hard for Bobby as he would have for John, opens his mouth, forms his lips around a word, any word, pushes in his throat, tries to say something - anything - until he snaps his jaw shut over silence.

He pretends not to see the disappointment on Bobby’s face. Pretends it doesn’t cut quick, deep, just tugs at the corner of his lips until a facsimile of his shit-eating grin appears on his face. It fails, just like the rest of what he does, if Bobby’s expression is anything to go on.

Bobby doesn’t offer to help, and Dean doesn’t ask.

\---

> _Sammy just turned two a week ago. He’s finally started babbling - and Dean’s started to talk again too, more than just the monosyllabic words I got when I tried to make him talk a few months back - actual sentences. They seem to understand each other perfectly, with or without words. I don’t have the same gift, which is why Dean talking is a relief. He acts as translator for Sammy’s wants and needs, sometimes not even needing to decipher Sammy’s babbles. Dean knows Sam intuitively, instinctively, and perhaps someday that will be what saves Sammy._  
> 

\---

It isn’t long before Sam realises someone is tailing him. Even nursing infected injuries and half-dizzy from the burning in his chest on his best days, he is still his father’s son, and Dean’s brother. He gives them the slip twice, but they’re dogged in their tracking, and his body is a traitor. He’s shivering in the basement of an abandoned building, sweat dripping from his hair into his eyes, and for a moment he wishes Dean were there, before he remembers that it was the point of the entire road trip he’s been taking. And then he hears them.

They’re not being subtle, which is their first mistake. An underestimated Winchester is - well, an underestimated Winchester. It is no small effort to force the rattling in his body to still, but whatever it is these men - hunters, he realises, and would have days ago if his mind was actually functioning - have in store, he is certain it’s nothing pleasant. The only other thing he is certain of, is that if he’s going down, he’s going down swinging.

He catches the first by surprise, deadly and silent - a quick, slick in-out between the ribcage, and then he’s down. He dispatches the next two as well, elbow sinking into gut, heel into shin, knee in the balls, and every dirty trick his big brother has ever taught him. He’s sixty-percent sure that one of them is no longer in the gene pool - or going to get laid, unless chicks dig scars that slash across the face over eyes and lips and nose. The other has a shattered knee, but then there are three more, and it’s only adrenaline that’s holding him up.

On the bright side, he supposes, the way he goes completely limp just when they’re getting ready for a fight is probably some form of revenge, as he smirks at the last glimpse of dumbfounded faces before everything goes black.

\---

“Sam Winchester.” He blinks owlishly against harsh fluorescent light, and doesn’t place the voice for a moment. “Guess they were right after all - there’s the Devil in you alright.”

A face floats into his line of vision, and if unimpressed incredulity shows on his face, he’s too tired to be polite. “ _Roy_?” Or his voice, actually.

His vision clears just in time to catch the brief flash of outrage on Roy’s face. “Huh - got it in one. Guess we didn’t do the job thoroughly enough the last time, Sammy boy. This time’s gonna be different, I promise.”

“Um.” He blinks again, squinting up at the manacles around his wrists and feet, tugging experimentally. “Yeah, okay.” Something should clue him into the reason for the expression of outraged incredulity that he keeps glimpsing on Roy’s face - or the other two hunters’, for that matter, but his brain feels like cotton wool, except saturated with liquid, so heavy he can’t seem to think straight.

“Where’s big brother, anyway? He coming to the rescue like the last time he did? Oh, wait - ” He seems to take Sam’s snort as a challenge for more. “Or has he finally seen the light and abandoned you?”

“I think he’s tracking us down, actually,” Sam replies absently, and starts examining the cuffs on his ankles. They’re heavy, lined with what seems to be similar sigils as the ones on his wrists. Demon, is what they think he is then, and apparently his soaked-cotton-wool brain seems to think it hilarious, because he starts laughing, unsettling enough to warrant a splash of what appears to be holy water on his face. He sputters a bit, realises. Demon is what they think he is, and they’re so _behind_ on the Hunters’ Quarterly that he snorts again, because all the work on his body right now, cuts and burns and brands - they’re the work of an angel. Two angels, really - two archangels, because once Michael figured out his destiny had all but been blown to shit, he’d become incapable of resisting his little brother, and if said little brother just wanted him to join in on the fun of torturing Sam, no complaints were going to come forth from him.

Pain bursts on the side of his face, familiar and annoying. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, bitch.”

It’s such a cliche line, Sam can’t help the huff that escapes his lips - and barely winces when a slap greets him again, this time stinging harder.

The next two hours, because Sam has been trained to count seconds even half-asleep, or in this case - half-dead, is a blur of abuse, verbal and physical, but if these second-rate hunters think they have anything over two angry, bored archangels, they’ve got another thing coming.

\---

At some point, Sam starts losing time. Part of it is out of pure boredom - if they call this torture, they really need to take a few lessons from Lucifer. Another part because much as he would like to be otherwise, he’s just downright fucking sick. The insistent throb in his chest doesn’t let up, burning and clawing and gouging - with that, he really doesn’t think it’s fair that his torturers are offended by his occasional inattention.

That all ends when he jerks awake with a thirst he hasn’t had for a while, and opens his eyes to a flask thrust under his nose. He raises his eyes to the man in front of him, and feels a jolt of satisfaction when the man flinches, liquid sloshing in the flask. A second later, the trepidation on his face turns into crowing triumph, and everything clicks into place.

“Go to Hell,” he spits, and the man before him laughs.

It’s another voice that speaks up, to his right - and it’s so much like a reunion of all the people he’s ever pissed off in his entire life that if not for the circumstances, he would have laughed. “What’s the matter, Sammy? Don’t like the breakfast we prepared for you?”

The thirst, the _hunger_ \- burns in his throat, through his veins, the only thing that has managed to rival that hand in his chest trying to claw itself out, propel itself forward. He wants. God help him, he wants. Every breath he takes, he wants, damning him to something worse than Hell. “ _Fuck you._ ”

Tim steps into his line of vision, grinning. “No,” he says, slow and cruel, “This is _so much better_.”

And it all goes to Hell.

\---

He feels it, coursing through his veins, like power, like ecstasy, like ash like failure like worse than death. And worse than anything else, he feels it, owning him, filling him, snaking into every tiny crack and pushing out any leftover good he’s ever had - pushing out that Dean-shaped ache in his chest, numbing it, making it insignificant. _Dean_ , he thinks, because his mouth might sully that name, _Dean, I’m sorry_.

\---

For a moment, he thinks he might have imagined it, finally actually going batshit insane. And then it’s Sam’s voice again - _Dean, I’m sorry._

He’s pulling up to the side of the road before he’s even aware of what’s happening, and then because he hasn’t done it since he’d turned seven, cautiously - _Sammy?_

There’s no reply.

_Sammy!_

The name echoes back, reverberating in an empty room.

\---

It’s at his eighth feeding of the day, bottle held to his lips, hand over his nose, choking him into swallowing, submitting, when he feels it. The cuffs have been burning him since the second gallon, a nuisance that barely registers, but when he pulls at them, twisting away from the blood, he feels it. The brittleness, the sheer weakness of the cuffs holding him in place, barely enough to hold him in place. And the coolness - because sometime between three and five gallons of demon blood, it’s stopped burning.

It’s probably credit to their lack of intelligence, or their basic inability to do any kind of decent research, that they don’t realise that demon blood isn’t weed, doesn’t make him susceptible, doesn’t make him weak. Drunk on power, yes, but Sam hadn’t turned to demon blood so he could feel weak or manipulated - it was the only thing that had cleared his mind, let him _think_.

“Just imagine,” it’s Walt this time, shaking the empty bottle between his fingers, voice soft and slimy and almost enough to make Sam crack the pipe he’s chained to and swing it at his head. “Just imagine, Sam, how good a show the withdrawal will be.”

Sam grins, loopily, gestures awkwardly with his cuffed hand, and Walt drops the bottle, moves closer, until his ear is almost at Sam’s lips. Rookie. “ _Just - watch_ ,” Sam murmurs, crystal-clear and steel-cold - and then he’s breaking the cuffs like clay, and then breaking Walt’s face like it’s the best feeling on earth.

It would barely take any effort to stop the hunters - all eight of them on duty - from reaching him, just a brief second of concentration to break a spinal cord, far too easy - but he takes his time, lets Tim rush at him, lifts a hand, and twists. “No,” he quips. “ _This_ \- is so much better.”

And stands back and watches as the rest of the men flee.

Walt is still on the ground, clutching at his pelvis, leg severed thigh down, half hanging off, and it is pure horror in his broken face. Sam cocks his head, lifts a finger to his lips.

“Just - _watch_ ,” he says, and walks out the door.

There’s nobody to stop him.

\---

Dean catches onto Sam’s trail two days later. Walks more than breaks into the warehouse - and it’s there that he knows something’s wrong. The basement is his first stop, because he knows Sam, and some habits Sam has just never been able to break. The blood takes no trained eye to notice. Some enough to be a fatal injury, some just hints, dragged along rusty steel or dusty concrete. _Hunters_ , he realises, remembering the break-in, rage rising like tide.

Whoever it was who had been going after Sam hadn’t cared about anyone going after them, and the thought sends Dean’s blood boiling, because they know, they know that Sam has a brother, has a Dean, and the thought of them thinking Dean doesn’t care - thinking that they could get away scot-free after touching his baby brother -

If nothing else in the world is certain, this is - they have a second thought coming.

\---

The warehouse - always the warehouses - he bursts into is empty. Well, not _empty_ , because there’s a dead man on the floor, and one barely alive, glaring at him. It takes a moment for him to recognise the face - Sammy must have done one hell of a job on his face. _Attaboy_. When it hits him, who he’s looking at, he just rolls his eyes and walks away to the - miracle of miracles, given the two exhibits he’s passed by - central attraction. The cuffs are broken, but the chains are still attached - to the pipes just above, and along the wall. And then - off to the side, two gallon bottles of dark red liquid. His hands are shaking when he walks over to Walt.

 _How long?_ Mouthed, because like a useless mute, he still can’t speak. A beat of silence, and then, miraculously steady, a hand on half-off stump that used to be Walt’s leg, something almost like pleasure blossoming at the unholy scream that tears out of Walt’s lips. _How long?_

There’s a moment more of gritted teeth and hatred, and then - “Five days.”

He nods once, satisfied. _How much?_

The answer is more forthcoming this time, spit out between bloody teeth. “Almost got all the sixth gallon in him.” A chuckle, almost deranged. “Didn’t get all of it in - but that’s still going to be one hell of a withdrawal, Winchester. Imagine what we could’ve accomplished, having a demon-killer at our beck and call - like a pet.”

 _Six gallons_ \- the hunter in him, the torturer - wants to stay and make the last few hours of Walt’s life the most memorable few hours, but there’s something else in him that’s chanting _Sammy Sammy Sammy Sammy Sammy_ , and he can’t ignore that, can’t ignore the aching burn in his own chest. He stands to leave.

“You should’ve seen him,” Walt yells after him, too obviously vying for a quick death. “He was like the Devil - if there ever was your brother in Sam Winchester, he’s gone. You should’ve been there.”

 _Yes_ , he thinks. _I should have._

\---

He doesn’t seem to be able to keep the sounds in - grunts and whimpers and sobs, embarrassing sounds - sounds Dad would almost certainly tell him to stop. _Suck it up. Be a man._

He doesn’t want to be a man. He was never born to be a man - just a stupid, pathetic demon-human hybrid, who doesn’t even have the strength to let his brother go. Of course, once Dean finds him like this, once Dean figures out what’s going on, the choice won’t even be in his hands anymore. For the better, he supposes, because then he’ll be back where he really belongs.

He’s shaking so hard, breath rattling and teeth chattering, that he doesn’t even hear the door open, metal grating harshly across the abused floor. And then, like damnation, like salvation, like everything good that has ever been in his life -

_“Sammy.”_


	3. and if you are a ghost

His hands are shaking so hard he’s barely able to pick the lock on the abandoned trailer Sam has finally picked to hole up in, his head rushing with so much blood it feels like there’s only static, and then -

In the corner, pulled in impossibly small, bloodied and shaking so hard the entire trailer is shaking as well-

“ _Sammy_.” Like something had just dislodged the lump in his throat, slipped the one word he needed back into him - “ _Sammy_.”

His brother’s head snaps up, eyes immediately zeroing on him, and at that moment, Dean’s world is righted, nudged back into track, pulled back into focus.

“Hiya, little brother,” he rasps, and takes the few strides to reach him, to brush back his shaggy mane, to _touch_ -

And Sam recoils. Flinches back, and the first word out of his mouth isn’t _Dean_ , isn’t even _hey_ , is - “ _No_.”

Dean stops short. Swallows. “Sam - ”

“No,” Sam’s rambling now, muttering more to himself than to Dean, “no - no, meant to _get away_ , you weren’t - no, _don’t touch me!_ ”

“I’m not - ” Raising his hands, stepping back, ignoring the amulet-shaped burn on his chest that’s only aching harder. “I’m - Sam, _Sammy_ , it’s me. It’s _Dean_.”

“Don’t touch me,” Sam says again, like it’s a mantra, like he doesn’t even hear Dean, and it’s too much.

“I’m not... Sam, I’m not going to hurt you,” he pleads, and takes a step towards Sam.

Who’s stopping his muttering to pull a bitchface at Dean- “Not hurt _me_ ,” he says, petulant. “He said, he made sure - ” And then he’s scrabbling at his shirt, pulling it aside to bare the skin on his chest, a brand, a symbol, amidst ruined skin.

Dean stops then, takes a step back, and folds his legs, sitting Indian-style across Sam. “Who said what, Sam?” It’s a throwback to when they’d move into unfurnished apartments for a couple months at a time, and had nothing more than mattresses for furniture.

“He branded me,” Sam’s saying now. “He promised me, he promised me I’d never have you. He promised I’d - I’d suck the soul out of you, because mine wasn’t good enough, wasn’t complete, and he’s never lied to me - he promised. He said.”

“You’d _what_?” Because whatever bullshit he’s ever heard, this was among the most ridiculous.

“You need to get away from me,” Sam’s decided, trying to push himself up on shaky arms. “He promised.”

Those two words break something inside Dean, and he’s standing, trying to ignore the pain, fear and relief warring in Sam’s eyes. And then he’s inches from Sam, and it’s like shushing a fretful Sammy, except he can’t touch, can’t ground himself, can’t soothe the burning in his chest, can’t soothe his baby brother, who’s screaming at Dean and trying to push himself through the walls of the trailer away, away, away. “Shut up, Sam,” he says, finally, choking the words out because nothing else is working and hearing his brother scream just _fucking hurts, alright_?

Sam stops, blessedly, _stops_. He’s looking up at him, eyes bloodshot, hair matted with blood and sweat, mouth still stained with demon blood, and he _stinks_ , but right at that moment, looking up at him like maybe he’s the only salvation left, Dean’s brother has never been more beloved a sight.

“He promised, Sam?” Quietly, because just because it’s hurting Sammy doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt him - if that could even make sense to start with. “You’d trust him over your brother, Sammy? Over me?” And then - “Look,” because the amulet beneath his shirt is threatening to burn a hole through his chest, he pulls the fabric aside, baring the scorch mark from where the amulet burned it in, in the last part of the ritual, twin to the one under the brand on Sam’s own. “I have one too. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Sammy - I just... I just wanted to bring you home.” He moves back then, but keeps his eyes on Sam.

The long throat works, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Still?” A hand, trembling, brushes subconsciously at his mouth.

Dean swallows against the flood of emotion threatening to burst forth from his lips. “Yeah, little brother,” he whispers, voice rough. “Always.”

“Promise?” Small now, hesitant - hopeful.

“Cross my heart,” Dean says, daring to crack a smile, and catches himself an armful of baby brother, hands fumbling with fabric, one finally settling over Sam’s heart, the other pressing against the pulse throbbing underneath his fingers. The burning in his chest eases. Sam falls asleep like that, cradled in his big brother’s lap, and Dean - at last - ceases being a living corpse.

\---

Sam wakes up with the smell of Dean’s clothes surrounding him, leaning against what his mind immediately supplies as _big brother_. It’s when he’s taking the second breath, greedily, that realisation drops on him like a ton of bricks, and with it, hot, humiliated rage, because he had promised, he had _sworn_ -

Dean - no, _Lucifer_ \- gives a startled yelp when Sam shoves him away and scrambles to the farthest corner of the room, a filthy trailer this time, it seems, and somehow, Lucifer doesn’t follow, just sits half-sprawled on the ground, staring at him. _He’s_ _good_ , Sam thinks, _like he’s been practising_. “You _promised_ ,” he says, trying to ignore the painful pull in his chest towards the Devil in the middle of the room, trying to forget the scent still lingering faintly on his clothes, beneath the stench of sweat and blood. “You fucking promised.”

Dean - Lucifer - looks confused for a moment, then shakes his head, and everything - _everything_ \- about him is so much big brother he can’t help but wretchedly, wretchedly _want_. “Hey,” and that’s the only thing to give it away, because Dean’s voice is never like that, never hoarse to the point of cracking, and he’s stopped talking to Sam that way for years now, soft and vulnerable, like it’s Sammy, like Sam’s a kid. “It’s just me - it’s Dean.”

_He’s trying too hard_ , Sam thinks, and pulls a sneer on his lips, then immediately wishes he hadn’t, because Dean - Lucifer - takes one look at his ugly, twisted face, and his eyes soften with so much - so much _love_ that Sam almost crawls back toward him and begs for his next punishment, because this, having this in front of him and never to be had again is so much worse than anything else Lucifer has done. “No,” he spits, his voice pathetic and shaking, “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to put all this on me, and take him away, and break your promise.”

“What promise?” Lucifer asks, still without a smirk, still soft, still hoarse, still _Dean_ , and Sam almost breaks down then and there.

“You’re not Dean,” Sam says, and he doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince. “I gave you everything so you wouldn’t be Dean. You don’t - you’re not Dean.”

There’s a pause, and Lucifer laughs then, and Sam still startles, because it’s a soft sound, sad and tired but not cruel. “When I was in Hell, you know what broke me after thirty years?”

“You’re not Dean,” Sam mutters, watches as Dean - _Lucifer_ \- rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t know where he’s going with that.

“Alastair came in for the seventh time as you,” Lucifer says, “and I almost hated those puppy eyes of yours - almost thought I’d gouge them out - ”

“Dean wouldn’t,” Sam blurts out, because he doesn’t want to hear this - doesn’t want to hear Lucifer talk about how much Dean really hates him, underneath all the layers of _caretaker_ and _big brother_ and _look out for Sammy_ Dad put in place.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t,” he says, quietly. “But he kept coming in as you, and every time he’d watch me get tortured, and then he’d walk out there. I knew it wasn’t you, but I thought - if you did that one more time, if _he_ did that one more time… maybe someday I would look into your eyes and I’d hate you. So when Alastair came in for the seventh time as you, and picked up the scalpel, I said yes.”

“You’re not Dean,” Sam says, but he doesn’t know anymore.

“Yeah, Sammy, I am,” Lucifer - Dean says, and his voice isn’t coming from the middle of the room, is just right there, and Sam looks up, and Dean is _right there_ -

Which means everything - everything, the running away, the demon blood, the killing people with his powers - oh _God_ , the killing people - “Go away,” he snaps.

The lines on Dean’s forehead deepen. “Sammy...”

“ _Go away!_ ” And then there’s a sickening thud, because Dean isn’t _right there_ anymore, he’s lying across the several feet to the other side of the trailer, and no, no, no _no no_ -

Dean just lies there for a few moments, still like death, and then he’s moving, looking up, and Sam’s twisting away before he can see Dean’s face, because he’s got demon and the Devil in him, and there’s no way Dean will want him back now that he’s seen what Sam can do, what Sam _has done_ \- “That what you really want?”

Sam swallows, doesn’t say a word.

“Look at me, Sam.”

_Sam_. Not _Sammy_ , not _little brother_. Not Dean’s brother anymore.

“Sammy, look at me.”

“Not Sammy,” Sam says, and the words feel like knives in his throat and poison in his mouth. “Not your little brother.”

Dean sighs. “You’ll always be my little brother,” he says, but there’s a smile in his voice, and rage bubbles in Sam’s chest, unwanted and irrational but _there_ and overpowering -

“No, I’m not,” he spits, and finally looks up at Dean, almost reveling at the fear in his face, because maybe this is his destiny, and if so he’s done with running away from it. “I’m a monster, some - some _blood-sucking vampire_ , just like you said. Just like you predicted. You’re right, Dean - you were fucking right all this time - ”

“Shut the fuck up,” Dean snarls, and it’s the moment it disappears that Sam realises it’s not fear on Dean’s face. He’s crossing the room and fisting his hands in Sam’s dirty shirts, and he’s shaking so hard it makes Sam’s shaking seem mild by comparison. “Shut the fuck up,” he’s growling, even though Sam isn’t saying anything, “He doesn’t get to put these - he doesn’t get to lie to you, I _never said_ \- ”

It’s almost an unintelligible roar that comes out of Sam’s mouth then, and his hands are in Dean’s shirt and he’s throwing himself at Dean, grinning fierce and bloody at the breath rushing out of Dean on impact. “Yes you did!” He’s almost screaming now, because fuck him, _fuck him_ — he never wanted Sam and Sam just -

The thump as Dean’s head hits the floor stuns him for a moment, but then Dean is on him again, and it’s pummelling fists and flailing kicks, until Dean’s skull hits the opposite wall with a crack, and he doesn’t move for a few moments.

The sound clears the rage-driven fog in Sam’s mind for a moment, enough for him to hate himself just a little bit more, and when Dean starts moving, he shakes his head resolutely. “Get out,” he says, dully. “I’ll hurt you. I’ll kill you.”

Dean huffs a laugh, but doesn’t move. “Well, I guess you’ll have to try and we’ll have to see then, Sammy.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” he snaps, harsh - desperate. “I’ll kill you. You know I will. You need to get out.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dean says, nonchalant and cocky as only he can be. “If you want to kill me, you only have to try.”

His fist hits the floor before he even knows he’s lifted it. He feels his bones crack, and sees a flash of emotion - fear, probably - pass over Dean’s eyes, but the floor also gives way underneath his fist. “ _I don’t fucking want to kill you, Dean,_ ” he seethes, and with the power zinging under his fingertips, in his veins, he’s never felt more helpless.

“Then I’m not going anywhere,” Dean says, earnest now. “If the blood wants mine so bad, it’ll just have to go through you to get to me.”

He’s sure Dean doesn’t make sense, but his head his throbbing and his chest is burning, and Dean is so very far away. “I don’t... You _said_ I was a blood-sucking vampire, you said you were gonna end me.”

Dean’s brow furrows. “Is that what he told you, Sammy?”

“He - _Lucifer_?” The rage, again, demon blood-strengthened, but Sam pushes it down ruthlessly, because tussling as they were hasn’t answered any of his questions. “You - you’re putting this on Lucifer?” He laughs then, an ugly sound, because wow, fuck Dean.

Dean’s staring at him like he’s grown two heads, or better yet - like he’s a blood-sucking demon vampire - and Sam resists the sudden subversive urge to bury his fingers in his brother’s throat. “I’m not putting _anything_ on the Devil, Sam,” he says, sharply. “I’ve never said it, I’d _never_ say it.”

Sam laughs again, too tired to play the game. “Yeah. Well, I heard it. Doesn’t make a difference now - I mean, you’re right.”

“You’re not a monster.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you saw the people I killed,” Sam says.

“I did,” Dean says, then almost like a joke, “Attaboy, Sammy.” There’s a moment of stunned silence, because - _what? -_ and then Dean’s speaking again. “You’re not a monster, Sam. I never thought it, ever. Never said it either - but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry I ever made you think you were.” He seems to think that’s the end of the conversation, because he stands up and starts to walk towards the door.

“Where’re you going?” The question comes out too fast, too nervous, and Sam ducks his head when Dean turns to look at him, feeling all of five years old again.

“You wanted me to get out,” Dean says, his voice carefully even. Then, slowly - “Sammy, do you want me to get out?”

Sam stops short. What the hell is he supposed to say to that? _No, please stay, don’t ever go away?_ “Better that way,” he finally mumbles.

“For who, Sammy?” Deceptively casual. “Because I’d rather stay if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’ll hurt you,” Sam says, voice small. “The withdrawal - the blood... You saw.”

Dean pauses. “Not that I’m an expert, Sam, but it’s been three days - I don’t think you’re going to start a murder spree now.”

“It doesn’t have to be for you to get hurt.”

\---

Sam is right. Forty minutes in, and nothing Dean does can stop Sam from shaking, or sweating so much he doesn’t know how Sam even has any more fluids inside of him, despite the bottles of water with which Dean plies him, because Sam throws them right up, tinged red, and then turns away, shaking any touch off even though Dean has already noticed that he breathes easier when they’re touching. He recognises shame when he sees it though, and hates himself a little more for not finding Sam earlier.

And then it starts. He falls asleep - five minutes maximum, looking at his watch - and wakes up to Sam’s screams. He’s clutching at his thigh like it’s been severed or impaled, and then he jerks again, and begins to gurgle, choking, his hand leaving his thigh to grab at his own throat. Dean is starting to worry that Sam will choke himself out when Sam drops both hands and resumes breathing. “Fuck you,” he hisses, and Dean barely has time to realise that Sam is glaring at him before he’s thrown to the wall, and seriously, he’s really fucking sick of getting thrown into walls.

Sam looks as surprised as Dean is when Dean looks up at him though, and then he’s screaming again, hands brushing at his chest, his arms, his entire body, and then fingers digging in - “Get them off, please - get them off, get them off, get them off - off _off off off off_ \- ” and almost worse than the screaming, a choked-off sob. He’s curling into himself, huddled in a corner, eyes darting between Dean and a spot in the middle of the room, wide, fearful, no hint of recognition in them.

Then - “Dean?” Small, hopeful, trembling - and Dean almost answers before he blinks sleep-deprived, blurry eyes to see that Sam isn’t looking at him. “Dean, please. I’m sorry - please. _Please_.” Liquid hazel, puppy eyes - blinking back tears, and then so much worse than the screams, worse than choking himself near into oblivion, he watches the hope drain from those eyes, and Sam nods, once. “Yeah. Yeah, I know. I’m - I’m sorry, Dean.” He nods again, eyes downcast, and then - a jerk, flinching like from something physical. Dean watches as his baby brother’s lips turn downwards, and - “ _He promised_. No Dean, Michael. You can’t...”

\---

“You may as well kill me straight out.”

“You’re a coward. I mean, seriously, why’d you get me out anyway? So you’d have some company, but you’re such a coward you just won’t accept that this is me. I’m part demon, Dean - you might as well get that in your head - you starve that part of me, all of me dies. But you just _can’t_ accept fate, can you? You and all of Dad’s rules - you can’t think for yourself. Yeah, well - when this is over and I’m dead, at least you’ll know for sure this time it’s _your fucking fault_ , because you’re a coward. Your little brother is a monster, Dean - you may as well accept it already.”

“You know my first thought when I got out? I thought - well, first I thought, it took you _that fucking long_? Because seriously, half a year. Half an actual fucking year, Dean. But then you know what I thought? I thought - better get away before he comes.” A laugh. “Yeah, because I knew this would happen. You always hold me back, Dean. Whatever I want, everything - you _always_ hold me back. I just wanted to get away, and you wouldn’t fucking let me.”

“Fuck you, Dean. _Fuck. You._ ”

\---

“Dean.” Soft, contrite. Hoarse. Dean picks up a bottle, slips a hand behind Sam’s neck and head, and tilts it over Sam’s mouth. A few moments of eager lapping, and then he pulls the bottle away. Rubs the sweaty mop of hair briefly with a thumb, and then moves back away. The last time he had stayed close, Sam had swung at him, getting one over his left eye, and then proceeded to scream himself hoarse. He doesn’t know why exactly he’s keeping away - if it’s because he doesn’t want Sam to scream himself any hoarser, or because he just can’t stomach the reminder that his brother can’t stand to be near him. Maybe that makes him the worst brother on earth, but at least that’s nothing he doesn’t know already, or that Sam hasn’t already told him.

It’s when his gaze is wandering that he notices the little aborted movements Sam’s making, like he’s trying to stop himself from moving towards Dean.

Their eyes meet, and for a moment Dean can read the want and the shame in Sam’s eyes, and then he’s ducking his head again, tucking his hands in between his legs and his chest, like if he hides them Dean won’t remember what he just saw.

When Dean stands up, Sam flinches, and that’s enough, because staying away, doing _anything_ \- selfish or selfless, was never to hurt Sam, and he’s done with Sam thinking otherwise. “Shh,” he says, like he’s calming a spooked animal, Standing) beside him, Dean rubs his hand gently on the crown of Sam’s head. Sam shudders, full-body, and then he’s so still he’s barely even breathing. Dean lets his hand drop to Sam’s neck, thumb brushing over the stubble on Sam’s jaw. “Shh, little brother,” and Sam makes a noise like a whimper, pushes his cheek into Dean’s touch.

Sam’s skin is wet and fast growing sticky beneath his thumb and he’s taking deep, shuddering breaths, and he smells really fucking bad, but Dean just presses down until Sam gets the hint and buries his face in Dean’s neck. A wayward hand finds the middle of Dean’s chest where the mark from the amulet still is, and presses down. Dean doesn’t think he knows he’s doing it, but when he puts his hand on the exact same place on Sam’s chest gingerly, mindful of the lattice of cuts and burns there, Sam whines and pushes up into his touch. Half a minute passes, and then, stutteringly, “I-I’m sorry, Dean. I’m s-sorry. Please.”

Dean shuts his eyes then, love for this kid - _his kid_ \- grinding down so hard on his heart he feels he might suffocate from the pressure. “Yeah,” he chokes out. “We’re okay, Sammy. We’re good, little brother. You’re okay. We’re okay.”

Sam is silent for a moment, and then Dean feels his heart thumping faster beneath his palm, and Sam’s hand on Dean’s chest tightens into a fist over his shirt. He takes a quick, pained breath, and then another one, then - “I want it, Dean,” said so falteringly and stammeringly Dean has to take a quick breath of his own. Sam must misinterpret it as fear or dismay, however, because he’s pushing away, hand in Dean’s shirt flexing to release - “I’m sorry - ” Dean quickly snakes his hand still on Sam’s neck down and presses it right back, pulls Sam back in.

“We’re okay,” he breathes, when he can. “I’ve got you, brother. We’re going to get through this, you and me, yeah? I’m not going anywhere. You’re going to be just fine.”

Sam just moans into his skin, the sound distressed and helpless, and Dean tightens his arms, takes his hand off Sam’s chest just long enough to hoist him up and pull him into his lap. It must look stupid, two grown men huddled together in a bizarre position - but this has always been their life, and Dean can’t find it in him to wish it different. If that makes him a little twisted, so be it. Sam whines again, a choked sound, and presses in closer, until the backs of their hands are on each other, crushed together so hard it’s hurting him and must be hurting Sam, like Sam is trying to hide within Dean. “I - I need, D-Dean, I need - ”

“Shh,” he whispers brokenly, and on a desperate impulse turns his head, presses his lips into the closest part of Sam, hard. “Shh.” His face is hot with too much - too much _everything_ , and if it grows wet, nobody will know that it’s not just Sam’s sweat.

They shake, together, from the force of Sam’s tremors, and Dean wonders if anything could have torn him from his brother’s side if they’d done this the very first time.

\---

Sam is really _fucking_ heavy, is what Dean thinks as he pulls Sam’s arm around his shoulders, starts half-dragging, half-carrying him to the car. Still shivering, but only because December is already on them, and it’s really Sammy’s own fault that he decided to run for nearly an entire month instead of staying overnight in the cemetery to _wait for him_. The memory of that still stings though, like acid on an open wound, far more than it warrants with Sam leaning pliant on his side, so Dean drops the thought and concentrates on moving Sam forward.

His body is shaky from the exertion when he gets Sam into the passenger seat of the Impala. At least Sam is all but unconscious to the world, so Dean threads his fingers through Sam’s (honestly filthy) hair, leaves a well-placed pinky on the pulse under Sam’s jaw, and tries not to think too much about how the weight of Sam’s head on his thigh feels like coming home.

He checks them in at the first motel they come across, stares for a moment at Sam’s face, lax with exhaustion, before lugging their things from the trunk into the room. The protective sigils drawn with clear glue stick, along with the salt, are second nature, and then he’s opening the passenger door where Sam is still asleep. “Hey,” he says, voice still hoarse - from disuse or exhaustion or all the shouting he’s been doing, “wake up, Sam.”

Sam shifts a little, and his eyes stay shut, but Dean knows he’s awake, and he can’t begrudge his brother a few seconds to gather what reserves he has left. “We’re here?” Sam finally says, and if possible, his voice is even worse than Dean’s, all but wrecked to pieces.

“Yeah, wherever here is,” Dean says, then pats Sam’s thigh twice, quickly. “C’mon, it’s freezing out here - we gotta get you cleaned up.”

_That_ gets Sam moving, the clean freak, and Dean grabs whatever part of Sam has the fewest injuries and pulls him up.

They move like old men, and by the time they get into the room, Sam has already evidently forgotten about cleaning up, starting towards the bed. Dean makes a noise and steers them away towards the bathroom instead. It shouldn’t be this easy, undressing his grown brother like a two-year-old, but exhaustion seems to have made Sam forget pride and his age along with it, leaning heavily on Dean and squirming impatiently to get in the water.

He washes them both efficiently, because Sam seems disinclined to do anything but stand under the hot spray, _still_ leaning on Dean, and he would far rather get out before his own knees decide to buckle under the weight of them both. Sam jolts when he touches the ruined, abused skin in the center of his chest riddled with a truly sadistic web of cuts and burns, and Dean shushes him, removing his hand from the tiled wall beside him to lay it flat against Sam’s back. He stays stoically silent when Dean washes the grime from the other cuts on his body though, as though pain hasn’t even registered, and Dean doesn’t know which is more heartbreaking.

Drying Sam off is easy, because Sam has already fallen half-asleep on his feet, but patching up his wounds takes another two hours. Sam wakes up for that, ironically enough, dark eyes tracking his every move listlessly, opaque and unreadable. He makes a noise in his throat when Dean finally reaches the area on his chest, dabbing the cuts with disinfectant. Little help they’ll do now, scabbed over and already leaking pus that Dean carefully wipes away, and Dean has decoded enough of Sam’s noises to know that it’s not pain in his voice but need. On a whim, he presses a palm over the skin, and watches as Sam swallows hard, eyes slamming shut and face turning away. Dean only catches a glimpse of wetness on the corners of Sam’s eyes before he stands up abruptly, twisting away from the sight, hating himself more than ever.

He doesn’t see the look Sam casts his way, ashamed longing mixed in with soul-deep despondency, before his eyes drift shut.

\---

Sam wakes up to an empty room, and there is no sign of Dean anywhere in the room from what he can ascertain from his vantage point in bed. The fierce sense of dejection that balloons within his ribcage is startling, like his lungs and heart and kidneys have been crushed against the too-small cage that is his body. His tear glands are just _reacting_ then, when he finds his face suddenly wet and his breath hitching.

It’s no surprise then when he misses the flutter of wings that herald Castiel’s appearance. “Dean isn’t here,” Cas says, rather pointlessly, then - “I’m glad to see you out of the Cage, Sam.”

For a moment, Sam even hates Cas, because he wants _Dean_ , and he wants _Dean_ to be glad to see Sam out of the Cage, to fucking _act_ like it, but he just swipes a hand over his face, and nods.

There’s a moment of silence and Sam almost laughs at the awkwardness. _Good old Cas._

“Yeah,” he finally says. “You’re not dead either, huh - with the... with the - ”

“Lucifer killed me,” Cas says, “but I was resurrected by God.”

“Good,” Sam says, and means it. “I didn’t - I wish I had - before...”

“You overcame Lucifer for Dean.” There’s something strange in his voice when he says that. “He was devastated without you.”

Neither of them say anything much for a while after that, because what on earth do you say to an Angel of the Lord telling you your brother was a mess when you were in Hell?

“He was getting better though,” Cas says, eventually. “He was with Lisa, and I think he was getting better.” He’s looking at Sam closely, but Sam can’t help the confusion showing on his face, because if he was getting better, then - “Then he started to hear you. Your soul - crying out, for help. You were in a lot of pain.”

He doesn’t have a name for the emotion that surges from deep in his stomach then, something a lot like horror and shame and pain he can’t speak how it’s choking his airway.

“It’s not your fault - you couldn’t have helped it.”

He almost laughs at that, because he was gone, finally gone from Dean’s life, and Dean was getting on, moving on - and now he’s back again, a burden Dean never even wanted, never had the choice to want or not want. “How - how did he do it?” He finally asks, when he finds his voice.

“I don’t know - but he appears to have been possessed by part of your soul,” and if Cas says anything after that, he doesn’t hear it, because there’s only one word in his mind, echoing infinitely like on a very bad loop - _possessed, possessed, possessed -_

“I need to - I need to get it out,” he chokes out, pleading, willing Cas to have a solution, willing anyone to have a solution. “He - I can’t - I need to get it out, destroy it, whatever -”

Predictably, Cas is silent. “It will hurt,” he says, finally. “A lot. But you and Dean are soulmates - Dean’s soul recognises yours as his own, he doesn’t know. It’s your soul that is tethered to the part that it still misses.” He pauses. “It will be like severing a part of you, Sam.”

“I don’t care,” Sam says, desperately. “I don’t care - get it out. Please. Just.”

“Alright,” Cas says, after what seems like an eternity, and then he reaches in.

\---

The door slams open with such force Sam looks up from his pain-filled stupor, startled. Dean appears behind the door, and his eyes are frantic. A moment later, Dean’s hands are on his shoulders, and he’s shaking Sam like a salt shaker. Or a pepper shaker. “What,” he growls, right into Sam’s face, and Dean really needs to have a drink - water, not alcohol, “the _fuck_ did you do?”

Sam takes a moment to sort through the sentence - six words, one profanity - and Dean swears again, a hand leaving Sam to clutch at his chest. He seems to be in discomfort, but Sam can’t see Dean too well through the haze, which, speaking of - why is there haze in the room?

Dean makes a sound again, releases Sam to sit on the bed beside his, and then pain hits Sam like an anvil - on his head too, because then he’s out.

He wakes up to complete silence and an ache in his chest he thinks he’s going to have to grow used to. And Dean staring stonily at him from his bed. “Um,” he says.

“What did you do,” Dean says, still stonily.

“Nothing,” Sam replies, honestly, because it was Cas who did anything at all, and Sam just lay there trying not to pass out. He notices Dean’s hand touching his over the bedspread, remembers what Cas said, and pulls back a little.

Dean is staring at the space between their hands when he looks up, and the expression on his face is bitter and angry and somehow almost - sad - at the same time. He stands up. Sam really shouldn’t feel the loss so absolutely _ridiculously_ but he does. Then - “Let’s try that again, Sam - ” with the voice he reserves for monsters who’ve hurt little kids or the equivalent, like, say, his little brother, “what in the ever-loving _fuck_ did you do? And don’t say nothing, because I went out to get fucking Advil for your fucking headache, and look what I came back with.” He spreads his arms, and Sam squints, because there’s nothing in his hands, as far as he can see, which isn’t very far - what with the killer headache that Dean’s right about. “Nothing,” Dean spits, and he has got to be really pissed, “because _you_ did something, and I want to know what the fuck I ran three red lights for.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Sam says, then hurries on before Dean decides to then and there murder his flesh and blood - even if it doesn’t seem quite half as terrible as it did initially. “I just. ” He pauses. “It’s just the soul - the soul thing,” he says. “I had - I had some of my soul in your body, so I just - I just took it out. Well, Cas did, actually - ”

“You wanted to take your soul out,” Dean says, kind of faintly, and Sam can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement or quite what at all.

No, he wants to say, because he didn’t - doesn’t, but it’s done and he asked for it and _why the fuck isn’t Dean happy now?_ “Yeah,” he finally says. “Yeah, I guess.” Then, because Dean is still silent and he hates it, “It’s all good now.”

Dean’s head snaps up like Sam had just announced he wants Dean to sell the Impala, and then he huffs a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. A pause. “Go to sleep, Sam,” quietly, and Sam doesn’t hear Dean’s voice for the next three days after.


	4. then my body is haunted

It’s ten kinds of messed up that he’s lying awake at four in the morning in the bed beside his brother’s, and he still jolts in shock when he turns and looks and actually sees Sam right there. Not in the way that normal people look over at people they’ve lost and found again, and are amazed at the miracle. Not in the way that he’d done when Sam came back, after Stanford, after Jessica, almost giddy at the thought that his brother was _there_.

It’s fucking demented, is what it is, that he can drive half a day in the Impala _forgetting_ that Sam is sitting there, _right there_ \- shotgun, scrunched up because he’s a Sasquatch. He would have gotten a single at the motel if he ever did that in the first place. It’s a serious thing that twice he’s left Sam behind now in a gas station bathroom, driven thirty fucking minutes before seeing a rabbit food container that he’d never touch (those things are poisonous) and remembering that Sam’s riding with him (or _was_ ). Dean’s not stupid, he knows it’s so far from even Winchester standards of normal that normal can be bigger than a fucking galaxy and look like a speck so tiny it’s, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

And he feels fucking _bad_ about it, okay? Not just leaving the guy behind, which he feels horrible about - he knows how it feels, being left behind, even if you want to leave - he feels bad all the fucking time, the way he does when Sam isn’t with him. Not even the kind where Sam’s hundreds of miles away in sunny-fucking-California, getting his law degree - no, the way he felt in Cold Oak, or in all the places he was when Sam was in Hell. The way he feels when Sam is _dead_. It’s like doing a disservice to him or something, having the real thing there beside you, close enough to touch - not that they do that much anymore, the touching thing, because Sam pulls away like Dean has the plague or something and that fucking hurts too, just one more thing to add on - and _forgetting_. Just. Just plain old forgetting.

Sam snuffles in his sleep, and Dean jumps almost a foot in his bed. _Fuck_.

He can’t do this - can’t just... He throws his bedcovers off, grabs the flask beside his bed, half-full (at least you can’t accuse Dean of being a pessimist), and is at the door when Sam speaks, apparently not asleep anymore. “You leaving again?” His voice is unreadable, much like everything about Sam these days. Not that Dean can do much reading of the guy that he keeps forgetting is there - but Dean is fairly sure it’s not a joke. If there is humour in the situation at all, Dean misses it completely.

“I wouldn’t - ” Sam snorts then, and God, he’s a dick in the middle of the night like that, it’s not like Dean _wants_ to forget him - “Shut the fuck up and go to sleep, Sam,” he snarls instead, because the room is suddenly too stifling and he needs to get out of there right the fuck now. The night air is a cold comfort - but refreshing enough to cut through the murk and make _him_ feel like a dick now. The door keeps slamming shut behind him, which is stupid and annoying and makes no sense at all, until he realises it isn’t the door, it’s just his head, deciding to have a party on its own without his permission.

It’s times like this when he knows Sam is in the room behind him and he’s sitting on the ground outside the room in forty degrees without shoes or a jacket or even an over-shirt on like a fucking idiot that, more than when he thinks, for real, actually thinks that Sam is in Hell, he _really just_ \- He heaves a huge, long, shuddering breath, grits his teeth, tells himself he’s a wuss twenty times - and he really just - he just wants to cry, is what, okay? He just.

It was supposed to be all good once Sam was out. It’s not that he thought it’d solve everything - goodness forbid that ever happen - but it was supposed to be okay. He’s not supposed to be sitting outside of the room his brother’s in, drinking like the world’s ending, when he’s done it, when he’s actually _done it_ \- saved his brother, found him, taken care of him, patched him up. He doesn’t want to sit outside of a room his brother’s in, drinking like the world’s ending, because he keeps forgetting Sam and Sam is pissed and he’s right to be pissed, but it’s - Dean can’t help it, okay? He can’t help that his brain is maggoty bread and doesn’t fucking work.

He doesn’t want to keep forgetting. He doesn’t want to leave Sam behind - he got the kid out of Hell and then went all over the map trying to find him, for a _reason_ , for crying out loud. He doesn’t want to forget Sam.

It’s some weird-ass impulse, probably from his entire life hunting things normal people run away from, and most definitely from his stint in Hell, but he pulls out the switchblade in his pocket and puts the blade over his forearm, the inner side of it, and digs in. He probably shouldn’t do it there, he thinks, as he twists the blade a little, a bit light-headed from the sudden rush in his body. It’s the closest thing to pleasure he’s felt for a long time, but that’s not why he’s doing it - just a side-effect, a pleasant one. When that spot on his forearm, easily concealed at the crease of his elbow, is adequately abused and messy with blood, he runs a thumb over it, hard, and thinks, as hard as he can - _don’t forget Sam_.

Yeah, he’s not unbalanced or anything like that. Still, whatever might work - Dean works on sense memory, and if pain is the best he can work with, that’s what he’ll do.

\---

 _No_ , he thinks, or tries to, because the one single thing his brain seems inclined to do is send him pain signals from every-fucking-where in his body. _No fucking way_ Dean would do that, he wants to think, except he isn’t really sure, and he’s kind of focusing on trying not to pass out (again) on the ground, and no help seems forthcoming. Not that Dean has been very forthcoming with his help lately, but he’s still Sam’s big brother, still looks at Sam with expressions that under other circumstances Sam might interpret as love, except too fucking morose to be anything but moroseness, and he’s still, for all it’s worth, riding with Sam.

Except for the few times he wasn’t. He really doesn’t know what Dean’s deal is, is the problem. He just... keeps going away, but then he keeps coming back. The first time, Sam woke up to to the unmistakable sound of the Impala starting up, all of the stuff they had in the room except Sam’s duffel tucked under a chair on the farthest side of the room gone. He’s maybe amenable to calling it a misunderstanding, because sometimes Dean is a jerk who thinks he’s funny. Still, he’s not sure if he hadn’t been so sure at that moment that Dean was going to leave him behind, panicked, and run out of the motel room barefoot, Dean wouldn’t have just actually - well, left him behind. After the one moment of sheer horror and shock on his face, Dean had grinned his shit-eating grin, obviously fake to Sam’s eyes, except every single of his grins had been fake and so that really meant nothing. And then - _“Just testing you Sammy, chill out.”_

And then there was leaving him at the gas station. Twice. He’d been too - adrift, to actually curse up a storm he wanted by the time Dean came back, skidding to a stop at the side of the road where Sam had just stopped walking, tires sending dust flying into Sam’s eyes.

It happened again, he thinks, but it had been in a small town, and Dean had driven back within fifteen minutes, grinning one of his annoying fake grins, telling Sam to hop in.

A guy can be expected to get the hint when his brother leaves him behind three times - and probably more close shaves considering the weird looks he’s been getting, like surprise or shock that he’s even there at all - but when said brother comes back every single time, it makes things exponentially more complicated.

Still, he hopes Dean doesn’t decide to break the streak this time, because _that_ would be a fucking dick move. It’s one thing to leave your brother behind at a gas station, or on the side of the road, or whatever. Sam can take care of himself. It’s another thing entirely to leave him unconscious in the middle of a fucking forest, with concussion and a ripped side and torn arm, all courtesy of the werecat that seemed to have a grudge against Sam.

Something in the corner of his eye catches his attention, a bright red creature - some sort of snake, except more like a giant centipede, with legs - slithering, creeping towards him. He scrambles away, and it disappears, and then - black.

His body is already shrinking away before he really registers anything other than darkness, and then he remembers - Michael getting bored in the Cage, and Adam apparently too unentertaining. All brothers have secrets, and Michael’s, apparently, according to Lucifer, is that he’s a terrible prankster. According to Michael, he’s a bit of a trickster, and Sam thinks he maybe understands why Lucifer doesn’t use that word, even though it fits the person better. Even the Devil is a little brother, and Sam understands the psychology of them uniquely, remembers when he’d slink away quietly, almost petulantly, when Dean had had friends in school. They hadn’t minded Sam, not that they’d have dared to show it, Dean’s protective streak for his little brother known and feared schoolwide. Still.

Something brushes against Sam’s bare leg, and he knows, in an instant, that it’s one of Michael’s honestly fucking infantile inventions - the giant cockroach. All the same, when it starts worming into his calf, feelers wriggling between muscles into his thigh, Sam screams.

\---

He’s forgotten what exactly made him so furious in the first place. The werecat’s dead, a heap of burnt carcass and ashes in the forest behind him, and he has two souvenirs to remember it by, in the form of a bump on the back of his head where it had charged him, and a scratch on his back. It doesn’t explain why his thigh hurts too, and he can’t see where claws might have torn the denim, but he’ll find that out soon enough - once he gets back to the motel and gets a look at it. The scratch on his back is going to be a nuisance to look at without Sam to do it for him, and his chest twinges briefly, deeply, at the thought of his brother, like pain is a legitimate candidate to fill up the void in his heart.

His mouth curls downward, but there’s nothing for it - he just revs up his Baby, ignores that he’s also starting to imagine Sam’s scent in the car, and drives back to the motel grimly.

Worse than his back, or even his head, his thigh is throbbing insistently when he stumbles into the room, dragging his duffel and the first-aid kit they - he stores in the trunk. It doesn’t make any sense, at all - it feels like an infection, but unless werecat scratches are also venomous, it can’t have started to show signs of infection barely an hour after. Cursing, he pulls his jeans down, and then the leg of his boxers up.

And for a minute, stares dumbly at the five neat slashes - knife slashes - arranged in some sort of fashion that looks like a poorly carved ‘S’. It’s aching with an urgency now, and when he realises it, it’s like a pile of bricks falling on him. Literally, too, because his head also begins to pound, unrelenting pain in the face of what he’s done, like it’s punishment - and at that moment, he can’t say he doesn’t deserve it either.

He barely takes enough time to snap the kit shut and pull his jeans up before he’s in the Impala, lurching onto the road.

Fuck. He fucking forgot Sam again. Thought about him, missed him, wanted him there, but for some un-fucking-knowable reason, _forgot Sam_.

One hand off the wheel, he digs his fingers into the cuts on his thigh. The pain is heady, but also dull, equal parts comfort and penance.

\--

_He spots the lone figure in the distance, forlorn. Lost. Dean sinks a fingernail firmly into the torn flesh at his forearm, vindictive, and then he’s swerving to a stop beside Sam. The kid looks up, hair flopping, and fuck him, because he doesn’t even look remotely pissed, just sad and unmoored, adrift. He looks up, and looks at Dean like - like Dean is his anchor, and Dean doesn’t know if he hates himself or Sammy even more, because why the fuck does he look at him like that? Dean’s messed up, and fucked up, and Sam knows it, doesn’t even want his soul to spend any more time than absolutely necessary in Dean’s body, like it’ll contaminate him or something. Goodness knows why he’s even still with him at all._

_Sam isn’t pissed, but when he gets into the car, he’s a little pissy, which makes Dean feel marginally better. It’s not what he deserves, not even close, but it’s something. By nightfall though, Sam’s back to quiet and occasionally twitchy. They don’t say a word to each other throughout._

_He slips out at night, knife gripped in his hand, better than whiskey. Sam won’t come after him - he’s spent enough nights freezing himself out to know. They’re in New Mexico, some pay-by-the-hour motel because neither of them have been up to credit card scams or anything more than a few pool hustles, so it’s eighty and Dean doesn’t even really care that he’s in his boxers - it just makes what he wants to do easier._

_The first cut is like absolution. The second like penance, the third purgation. He digs them in hard, and when he’s done, he has a memento of his brother carved into his flesh, because apparently, knowing the guy all his life and having him right beside him isn’t enough. If it’s a little too twisted, he’s always been a wreckage anyhow. When he starts breathing normally, he goes back in. Sam is pretending to be asleep._

\--

Sam is jerking and twitching and crying out like he’s been screaming himself hoarse for the past hour, which probably is the truth. Dean drops to his knees beside Sam, cataloguing his injuries on autopilot, and then he’s reaching out to touch Sam - miracles of miracles, he doesn’t buck Dean off, just keens and pushes into the touch, and Dean hates that some part of him, some stupid, selfish part, wishes Sam could stay like this, just so Dean wouldn’t think he was contagious with some horrible disease every time he got close to Sam. The larger part of him has no time for inane thoughts, and just drags Sam closer to check on his bloody side and arm.

Sam makes a noise again, halfway between a sob and a scream.

“Sammy,” Dean tries, and then, because Sam is still twisting in his grip like he’s having a nightmare, barks, “Sam!”

Sam jerks, and Dean takes the opportunity to move into Sam’s line of vision, not that he thinks Sam is seeing anything that’s actually there right now.

“Hey,” he says, “Hey, kiddo - you’re out, man. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not real. We got you out, and you got yourself away from those sons of bitches who tortured you, remember? You’re okay, Sammy. You’re okay. You’re out, man - you’re - ” He breaks off, because what kind of mess are they in that he abandons Sam because _he_ thinks Sam is still in Hell? “I’m sorry I left you, Sammy,” he whispers, finally, and lets himself lean forward, until his forehead touches Sam’s. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Sam jerks again, once, and then he’s blinking, and Dean knows the second he realises what’s going on, because he stiffens, and flinches away.

Dean swallows. “Let’s get you up,” he says shortly, after an awkward silence, and tries not to feel - _anything_ , at all, when Sam puts a hand out, warding him off, and painstakingly makes three tries before he finally digs his fingers into the bark of the tree he’s closest to, and hauls himself up. He staggers his way back to the car without Dean’s help.

\---

 _What do you say when your brother’s so done with you he can’t even bother to pick you up after a hunt before going back to the motel to patch himself up?_ Sam doesn’t say anything, and it’s not like he can make much sense of anything that’s going on anyway, because why come back? Why even bother to patch him up again afterwards, washing out the claw gouges, stitching them up, putting butterfly bandages over those on his arm? It’s confusing as hell, is what he would say, if he hadn’t been to Hell. In his case, then, he’d say it’s more confusing than Hell, if he were inclined to try to say anything.

Dean _doesn’t_ say anything at all, still goes out in the middle of the night wearing just a t-shirt, even if it’s March and they’re in fucking Oregon, because his presence is just too much to bear. He doesn’t miss how Dean seems to find it difficult to breathe around him. How he breathes easier after he’s spent three hours outside, looks - well, he doesn’t look less miserable, but less strung up. And if it fucking hurts to see his brother hurting like this, it’s not even in the same category of pain to know it’s because of him. He doesn’t know why Dean even stays, probably something along the lines of responsibility and duty and Dad’s orders, even though the guy’s been dead for five years now. He can’t even dredge up much annoyance at that, because when did Dean ever have a chance?

He never did, that’s right.

He watches Dean pace around the room like a caged animal, looking at Sam every five minutes as if to check that he’s still there, like Sam’s his guard or zookeeper or something. He doesn’t even leave the room, just opens can after can after can of soup and heats them up for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. He drinks like it’s keeping him alive, and when he thinks Sam can’t see or doesn’t know or some ridiculous crap like that because _they’re in the same fucking room, for fuck’s sake,_ he plays with his knife a lot. Sam doesn’t know what that means, except it doesn’t make him think Dean wants him to stay.

As if all the times he’s left Sam haven’t been hints enough.

On the third day, Dean opens his mouth, says “ _Sammy_ ”, apologetic and gentle and Sam realises he really doesn’t want to hear Dean say anything at all.

“ _Don’t,_ ” he chokes out, because he gets it. He really does, okay, he does. He’s overstayed his welcome, and he’s going to leave, but he just - he doesn’t want Dean to say it, to put it out there, because on top of every other horrible memory - not that he doesn’t deserve it, but all the same, horrible - he doesn’t want his brother telling him to leave too. He swings his legs off the bed, picks up his jacket. “I’m leaving.”

He says it like a peace offering, but Dean seems to take it like a huge _fuck-you_ , which, given how many times Dean’s left him when he could just have said something, or - something - maybe it is too. Sam swings his duffel over with his good arm.

“I’ll just... find some car to hotwire,” he says, trying for a joke.

Dean just stares at him. Then - “Yeah.”

It’s even worse than the last time, when Sam had started the Apocalypse, almost ended the world, and Dean still found it in him to offer him the Impala, even though Sam would never have taken it, would never have taken Dean’s home away from him, not when he’d taken away everything else. He almost laughs, but he just nods at Dean and walks out the door.

\---

“I’m leaving,” Sam says, not even wanting to hear Dean’s apology, and Dean just - freezes.

_“I’m leaving,” Sam says, and Dean’s world crumbles and crashes into a sad heap at his feet. “Don’t come after me. Don’t - just - don’t.”_

_He starts after Sam. Tries to say something - he’s the mediator, for fuck’s sake, have been doing it since Sammy learned to talk, translating toddler babble into sentences, translating teenage rebellion into ambition - he can make Sam stay, just long enough to talk it out, make Dad understand, make this not just -_

_“If you walk out that door,” Dad’s voice, “don’t you ever come back.”_

_And Sam looks back. Looks at Dad, then at Dean, like Dean’s supposed to say something, and he would, would fix this, make this okay, if he could, but he’s sluggish, slow, too slow for Sam, who’s a whirlwind and a storm and has no time for stupid, unambitious older brothers with nothing but a GED under his name, and - he just - nods._

_Walks out the door._

_And takes all of Dean’s words with him._

Sammy’s saying something, making a joke, or something, and Dean wants to say - wants to say “I’m sorry”, or “Don’t go”, or _something_ , and what comes out his mouth is just - “Yeah.”

He can’t read Sam’s face, maybe because everything is a blur now, and he can’t see through the fog. Sam just... just _nods_.

Dean watches him walk out the door, and doesn’t move for the next hour.

\---

The radio comes on two hours out of Minnesota. Sam drives ten hours straight after that, tears streaming down his face, out of his eyes, and he doesn’t even know why or how to stop. The gas station clerk takes a look at him and then a careful step back. He almost laughs, but a six-foot-four grown man acting like his tear ducts aren’t on overload while driving a Bentley is bad enough without laughter to add into the mix.

He realises his phone is ringing when the screen shows fifteen missed calls and one incoming. He fumbles at the device with stupid fingers until it shows sixteen missed calls instead, flickers, and dies. He doesn’t charge it.

In Wyoming, he almost runs straight into a semi, having drifted over to the wrong side of the road. He stops then, pulls up on the side, and tries to remember which day of the week it is. The light from the screen of his phone is glaring when he finally plugs it into the charger port in the car; he squints at it, trying to make sense of the glowing symbols on the screen. _You have (1) text message from D_ , it says, unhelpfully, when he finally makes out the words. He swipes at it to clear it, but the screen just blinks and opens up the messaging app.

 _Whdjfdkfdiyjuoleqwvebjm,e         e_ \- it says.

Sam just sits there for a long time, hand gripped around his phone, cloaked in the darkness of a starless night.

Just before dawn breaks, Sam reaches into his duffel, pulls out a crumpled, half-eaten bag of M&M’s, puts it in his lap, and starts driving. The sheets in the motel smell like they’ve been dried saturated in cigarette smoke. The diner food - double-steak cheeseburger - tastes like ash in his mouth, and it hurts his stomach, empty after almost two days of straight-driving. The next morning, he gets a bag of M&M’s from the gas station, fills up the tank, and starts driving again.

\---

One day late April Sam’s sitting in the darkened old movie theatre, and they’re showing Porky’s II, in the theme of some strange festival the small town’s got going on. There’re a few families, bringing the kids out for a movie over spring break, but it’s mostly empty. Sam sits at the back (where they always used to sit), arms full of popcorn and soda. He probably looks weird, a grown man with hair almost long enough to be a hippie, sitting by himself to watch an old - and honestly not very good - movie. He’s not young enough to pass off as an angst-ridden teen and not old enough to be a lonely old person, so the adults all herd their children away from him, that he’s left with a corner all by himself.

It’s not difficult to pretend Dean’s sitting right beside him, making comments and gripping his arm to catch his attention when something good comes up. Sniggering and trying to stifle laughter, eyes sliding to Sam, crinkling a little bit more the way they do when do when he’s more happy than amused. Stealing Sam’s popcorn when he has his own, rolling his eyes hiding a smile when Sam tries to stop him, pleased dimples digging in deep when he doesn’t.

That night is a bad one. He walks out the theatre with tears streaming down his face, movements slow and sluggish, brain slower and more sluggish. People take glances at him and then hurriedly look away, embarrassed, dusk not falling fast enough to cloak him in its darkness, no big brother to shield him from strangers’ gazes. The diner is right across the street from the motel he’s staying at. He walks past it, leaning his forehead on the doorjamb when he’s closed it behind him.

There’s no familiar clutter, no crumpled up take-out trash on the coffee table, habits that Dad’s militaristic training never managed to wick out of Dean. He used to think that Dean loving Sam was like that too, unshakeable, unchangeable, even when everything else wasn’t. An anchor, touchstone, the truth on which everything else was built. Dean doesn’t _hate_ him, that much he knows. Maybe even loves him, like normal brothers do. Like he wanted to. Like when he fought against every small gesture of love before Stanford, told Dean to stay out of his life, because no other older brother he knew ever made school lunches for their little brother. Ever asked their little brother how every single school day had been, sat their little brother down and made sure every single piece of homework had been done. Because it wasn’t normal - wasn’t normal to feel that surge of homesickness the first day he went to school without Dean, and every day after that, wasn’t normal to immediately think _Dean_ when a bully knocked him down on his ass, wasn’t normal to want to fuck up his own _Dad_ when Dean - invincible, bigger-than-life Dean - had been hurt on a hunt because John had neglected to watch Dean’s back. Sam had just wanted to be normal.

He almost snorts at that. He’s not even thirty, and he’s been to Hell - let it fuck his brains up (there are times when he still thinks he’s back in the Cage), and the only reason he’s still moving, still alive, is because of a drunk text from his brother that he still won’t let himself attempt to decipher.

At nine, his stomach starts hurting, clamouring for food. He takes the chance to disabuse his stomach of its importance to him - pushes his fingers into the flesh on his abdomen so the nails cut in and leave bloody half-moons, and then does it twenty more times.

He has whiskey for dinner, and then supper, and a midnight snack, and then breakfast and lunch after that, so it would be inaccurate to say he’s starving himself. Goodness knows how he doesn’t get alcohol poisoning from all that, but he throws it all right up between meals, spends most of his time huddled over the toilet, digging into the little grooves his fingernails have left behind. It makes him feel marginally better.

The morning after, he goes down to the diner and eats breakfast, ignores all the stares coming his way, and then drives until twelve-thirty, where he stops and has lunch. At six-thirty, his take-out arrives at the motel, and he eats the pizza while looking over the news. When he’s done, he doesn’t remember what he ate or a word he read.

\---

 _He half expects the door to burst open as soon as he slams it closed behind him, half expects to hear Dean’s voice, asking him to stay, telling him it’s okay, something - which, when only silence greets him, is probably laughable. Dean is every inch of him Dad’s son, his perfect soldier, and a traitorous part of Sam wonders if the love his big brother bestows on him is really just Dad’s orders - take care of Sammy, look after Sammy, like he’s a job, like he’s a_ responsibility.

Sammy.

_He starts, almost turns around even as he’s stalking past the strip and round the corner. But there’s no Dean, no big brother, no Dad, no family in the cards for him anymore - at least, not the one he’s known all his life. Imagining - because that’s all that is - Dean calling for him when he’s probably just carrying out Dad’s orders like a good little soldier._

Sammy.

_Sam jolts. Then he starts running, because - because fuck Dean, he didn’t say a word while his own father kicked him out, couldn’t raise a single argument, couldn’t even ask Sam to stay, couldn’t even - and yet Sam just wants to turn back, just wants to run back to his big brother and cry into his shoulder like a big fucking baby, just wants Dean. Except Dean doesn’t want him, because Dad’s just dismissed him from his job, and Sam doesn’t have a big brother anymore. Maybe all he ever had was Dad’s other son._

_He reaches the bus station just as the rain starts pouring down, which is stupidly cliche and also annoyingly not, because his face is fucking wet but he isn’t, and he’s just. Just standing there, blubbering pathetically in the corner, because somehow in the middle of the night the men’s is all packed (what is all packed?), and he doesn’t want to get into a fight when he’s itching like this for one, like bloodying someone’s face will maybe calm the burning rage inside him, like getting his own bloodied will release that suffocating pressure in his chest._

_Fuck Dean, is his conclusion, when his tear ducts stop rebelling. Fuck Dad, fuck Dean - because if they don’t want him, then maybe he doesn’t want them either._

\---

It’s not supposed to hurt this much, he’s sure - not when he knew it was coming in the first place and deserved a hell of a lot worse. It’s supposed to get better too, not feel like his heart is getting ripped out, put back, and then ripped out again. He’s seen his brother’s back retreating more times than he cares to count, and the sight still never fails to drive the same rusty nail straight back into his chest. Like one of those toddlers’ toys Sammy used to play with, chubby thumbs pushing the block in and right out again with his fingers from the other side. And he knows he deserves it. That _Sam_ deserves it, deserves to be free of Dean, of a brother who can’t stop leaving him behind. At least Sam had reasons - every single time - Dean just... just _forgets_.

The first time is an accident. So are the ones after that, really, but the first time he doesn’t even think it, just leans in for the fangs to embed in his skin, knocks his forehead on the vamp’s, and rears back enough to lop his head off. He’s lucky none of the blood from the seven other vampires he kills gets into the open wound on his neck - or anywhere on the three other ones on his side, leg and arm - but it’s not fear that pumps his blood faster when he looks to check, or when he thinks of chopping his own head off if he turns.

He doesn’t think too hard about why he decides to hunt down an entire nest of vamps on his own - Bobby would come in a moment now that he talks and walks like a real boy, doesn’t have an unhealthily over-attached soul bond on him anymore. It’s the job - he does it, and if he bites the dust... well, there’s no one to ever know or miss him.

Once the thought enters his mind though, he can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a drug, like an addiction - not tantalising sweetness, just zero-to-hundred sheer need that makes him junkie-eager for the next hit. He takes on demon factions, werewolf packs, turbo-charged ghosts - anything he can get his hands on. Goes across the country to get to the most brutal hunts, drives overnight and charges in stumbling, relying on adrenaline to pull him through.

It does more than that. If Sam leaving brought anything good at all, it made him a better hunter. He’s charged and ultra-focused, adrenaline giving him strength where training might have failed, and he has nothing to lose - everything to gain. Pain is only an incentive. Within a month, he’s amassed a couple years’ worth of scars (wounds, if he’s honest - there’s no one to lie to anymore, no one to hold him accountable anymore - and if anything the job has made him into a compulsive liar, even to himself).

On top of the self-inflicted ones. It’s not self-harm if it serves a real purpose, he tells himself. The thing is, he doesn’t stop forgetting because Sam’s gone. If anything, it takes even longer to remember - and yeah, carving Sam’s name into his skin is kinda creepy and weird even for them, but it helps, and it’s not like there’s anyone to judge him. If it feels good - better, anyhow, than the dull haze he’s in when he’s not hunting, it’s between him and - well, himself.

May 2nd is another reason to believe that God doesn’t give a damn anymore, because fuck all, _how is it possible that there is no fucking hunt on that one day he fucking needs a hunt?_ He spends the day drinking away his entire - topped-up - stash of alcohol, celebrating Sammy’s birthday. He puts his phone away securely enough that he won’t be able to get to it drunk, because the last time he drank the day away, he’d sent a drunk text to Sam, and that’s the last thing he wants to do again. Sam deserves to spend his birthday in peace, without Dean ruining it all drunk texting him.

He jolts awake at five in the morning from a nightmare, looks over to the empty bed beside his, and proceeds to throw up the entire stash of alcohol he consumed the night before, along with whatever else was in there. He remembers that Sam _isn’t_ , actually, in Hell anymore, at three in the afternoon, because the cuts on his arm are scabbing over and itching, and that’s when he remembers.

He picks at them after his fifth round of dry-heaving, tears the scabs off and carve right back into half-healed skin until they spell a bleeding S-A-M. Then he heaves a little more, until sleep mercifully takes over.

\---

Bobby calls him on a hunt, and he’s so shocked that he doesn’t think to end the call before it starts blasting terrible, tinny music from the speakers. The creature he’s been stalking - amassoffur, he’s decided to name it, because it really is nothing else but that, a mass of fur and two red eyes - turns towards him, and then he has a second before it flattens him entirely beneath its huge, furry mass. Instead, he ducks, and at the very last moment, darts forward so the _amassoffur_ ends up on its belly, its behind barely missing Dean. From there, it’s just a quick slash-and-stab job. The creature whines pitifully once, and then drops dead. Well, it doesn’t really _drop_ dead, because it’s already on the ground, to be precise, but - it’s dead, and Dean only remembers to pick his phone up then, panting a little.

Somewhere in the scuffle he must have connected the call - he doesn’t really remember - and Bobby’s voice is yelling at him now.

“- hell, answer me Dean!”

“Hi, Bobby,” he says. “Sorry, was on a hunt.”

“And what stupid fucking teacher did you have that you didn’t think to switch your phone off on a hunt?”

“Hey,” he says, defensively, “That’s my dad you’re talking about!”

“That’s right,” Bobby shoots right back, “And I know for a fact he made you turn off your phone every time you were on a hunt with him, so what were you thinking?”

“Dude,” Dean says. Then - “Why’re you calling, Bobby?” Because _yeah_ , maybe he would’ve been company for shit trying to find Sam, and okay, so maybe a phone call would’ve been pointless when Dean wasn’t talking, but Bobby hasn’t tried to reach him at all for the past almost six months, and it’s just kinda fucking lonely, is all.

“Sam with you?” He asks, then - “Of course not. He wouldn’t have let you hunt with a live bomb in your pocket to give you away.”

“What’s up with Sam?” He says, because he really doesn’t want to talk about what it’d be like with Sam around.

“People looking for him,” Bobby says succinctly. “Hunters - got a Roy in there somewhere, Creedy. Don’t think they mean good.”

Dean runs a hand over his face. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you should probably give him a call.”

There’s silence on the other end for a while. “What’s between you two again?”

“Nothing,” he says, quickly. “Nothing, just - look, Bobby - I got a hairy carcass here I’ve got to take care of, you do me a favour and give Sam a heads up on that, make sure he’s okay, yeah? Gotta go.” And then he snaps his phone shut. This time he does switch it off.

\---

May is bad. The second day of May, he holds a conversation for the entire drive from Arkansas to Illinois with Dean, out loud. At night, in his motel room, he smashes his phone into the wall, and then digs his fingernails into his arms and his thighs and his stomach. The phone doesn’t ring. He falls asleep staring at Dean’s drunk text from seven weeks ago, nose buried in one of Dean’s old t-shirts that had made its way into his duffel somehow.

The next day, he follows a trail on one of the hunts he’s been researching - things that sound vaguely like demonic activity, but feel like angels. Like Zachariah and Uriel and all the douchebags he’s ever encountered, but with the scent of betrayal and Castiel all over it. He’s stuck in a hallucination for the entire night, and when morning dawns and the hallucination passes, he’s famished, which means he gets to throw up everything he eats later.

Bobby calls one day late in May, tells him that hunters are trying to find him. He snorts at that, promises he’ll take care of himself, tells Bobby that no, he doesn’t need him to come over, ignores his question about Dean, and then hangs up. About three days after that, he finds himself a stalker, loses him, and squats in an old farmhouse until he gets sick, and coughs up half a lung. The half-moons on his body get to heal in the three days he gets over his fever, because he doesn’t have the strength to push the nails in hard enough. It leaves him cranky and itching for a fight, so when he’s better, he finds his stalker and gives him a few wounds to mull upon.

So yeah, May is bad. But _June_ \- June is infinitely worse.

\---

It happens on a hunt. One moment he’s alive, the next - not so much. And yeah, okay, maybe he knew it was going to happen eventually, maybe he was even gunning for it in his own roundabout way, but he’s just... he’s just fucking tired. He’s done with his job - Sammy’s doing well enough on his own, from what Bobby told him. Not _happy_ , but Dean can’t do anything about it except continue to stay away, and he’s just. He’s done. So yeah, he took the coward’s way out and didn’t even off himself, just kept tackling more and more monsters without enough research until he knew he was going to die on one of the hunts eventually. Didn’t really _plan_ for it, though, so it’s still a bit of a shock when Death appears in front of him, and doesn’t look remotely pleased to see him - what a fucking surprise.

“I’m not going to reap you,” Death says bluntly, cuts right to the point, and - well.

What a _fucking_ surprise.

\---

Sam jolts awake at two in the morning, and knows for a fact that Dean is dead. The entire universe is screaming it at him - pain so consuming he doesn’t know its source or where it’s the worst, and the world turns - literally - grey. So yeah. May is bad. But June -

\---

“Why the hell not?” He says incredulously, when he finally finds the words, and doesn’t give a damn that he sounds like a five-year-old with a very age-inappropriate colourful vocabulary.

Death sighs, an exasperated sound that makes him at once more human and infinitely less so. “If you would let me speak, I might be able to explain it,” he says pointedly, and Dean shuts up, because this one he really wants to hear. Heaven’s done with him, and Hell’s had its share - might be getting more too - and he’s still not going to get to die? Fucking really? “Don’t swear, Dean,” Death cuts in mildly. “It’s rude. There’s a natural order, Dean - and being you, you messed it up. Again. I’m not going reap you, because your brother is still alive.”

He’s sure the expression on his face is quite enough to convey _what the fucking fuck did you just say?_ Because Death sure as hell had no issues reaping Sam _before_ , before everything had gone wrong, when not reaping him might have saved both of them a lot of - well, _crap_.

“That little ritual you did bound your soul with Sam’s, but that is just a detail - you have always been bound souls - in your case, the ritual simply managed to call part of Sam’s soul into your body before it succumbed to the blood loss. You’re lucky, Dean. If it were anyone else, you would have destroyed both souls. The ritual did something else though - it bound your _fates_ together. They are now intertwined, and unless your brother shares your fate, you cannot be reaped.”

“No. No - Sam undid it, he wanted his soul back, and Cas helped him - ”

“Your brother,” Death interrupts, “is still without part of his soul. The angel could not have put Sam’s soul back into his body if he tried.”

“I - ” Dean stops, abruptly. “I need to give Sam his soul back - he wants it _back_.”

“Is that what he told you?” Death says more than asks. “It’s not your decision to make alone, Dean, and it wasn’t Sam’s to make either.”

\---

Sam’s blind with pain for what seems like hours, curled up on the filthy motel room carpet that still smells like stale cigarettes. Finally, it starts to recede, fading to a dull roar. His jaw hurts from his mouth torn open in a cracked, silenced scream, and his throat feels like road rash.

He walks the earth like a ghost, and it’s as though everyone else sees through him a little too, like he’s become translucent, there only if he tries to get their attention. Two weeks pass by, agonisingly slow and yet like a blur - and then he blinks, and Dean is standing in the middle of the room. He doesn’t even comprehend the complete chaos of emotion that surges in his chest, just opens his mouth in a wordless inhuman cry and launches himself at Dean, panic worming through every part of him, eating into every nerve ending, and he’s babbling, pawing helplessly at Dean, can’t even stop himself, not even when his brain lurches into motion, screams _don’t touch Dean_ in Cas’s voice.

“What did you do, what the fuck did you do Dean, what - ” he’s demanding, and his voice is too shrill, cracking mid-word, but Dean just barrels right over his words, hands fisted in the collar of his shirt, and he’s shaking him (or the other way round, he doesn’t even know anymore) -

“You didn’t tell me you were in pain!” Is what comes back at him, hard and furious and _wounded_ and Dean shakes him again, turns them around and slams Sam into the wall, pins him there with his hands. “You fucker, were you even thinking? You were missing part of your soul and you couldn’t open your mouth to _tell me_? Do you even - you don’t even trust me enough to - ”

And that finally jerks Sam from the haze of confusion, pushes hurt and anger through everything else and he shoves back, hands still incapable of letting go of the spastic hold he has on Dean’s jacket. “You were _gone_!” He screams, voice cracking painfully. “I woke up and you weren’t there and all I could hear was you fucking telling me that you were done with me - ”

“I’ll never be done with you, you fucking idiot,” and Dean’s hands are on his shoulders now, fingers digging in so hard it hurts and yet it’s the most heavenly thing he’s felt all fucking half of a year. “When will you get it in your head that I’ll never be done with you? You just - you’re - ” He stutters to a stop, eases up on his grip on Sam, and removes one hand to dash it over his face.

“You were dead,” Sam accuses half a moment later. “You _died_.”

There’s a brief flash of surprise in Dean’s eyes, and then he’s shrugging, nodding. “Yeah, well - I’m here, aren’t I?”

Anger bubbling just beneath the surface swells up so fast Sam barely stops himself from clocking Dean one - “ _Two weeks_ ,” he hisses viciously, “two fucking _weeks_ you were _dead_ , and that’s all you can say?”

Dean just glares at him. “I didn’t have a lot of fucking options, okay, Sam?”

And the world screeches to a halt. Dean seems to realise what he just said, eyes widening and he opens his mouth, but Sam beats him to it - “Did you kill yourself?”

Dean’s face scrunches up in incredulity. “No!” But his eyes dart away, and Sam suddenly feels like his entire world is crumbling -

“Dean, did you kill yourself?”

And he’s begging, begging Dean to say no, to convince him - but Dean just looks away and shakes his head. “I didn’t, okay?” He takes a deep breath. “I was on a hunt.”

Something in Sam tells him to just leave as that, but he can’t, can’t just act like - like this doesn’t matter, like Dean being fucking _suicidal_ is okay - “Did you plan it? Did you want to die, Dean?” And then Dean looks up, and he almost gives up asking, because the look on Dean’s face - just... pain and so much shame, but he can’t. “Dean,” he says, and watches as his big brother’s entire expression just crumples, for a moment, and then gets shored up behind a mask.

“What do you want, huh, Sam?” He spits out, harsh and fast, and whatever pain isn’t in his face is in his voice, and Sam hates himself for asking, for wanting to know, for being the biggest source of pain in Dean’s life. But then Dean seems to see something in Sam’s face, and his entire countenance softens. “I don’t know what you want from me, Sammy,” he says, sounding suddenly so weary Sam’s heart aches for him. “You left, again, and - I know I deserved it, after everything I put you through, and it was probably even better off if not for all this - soul crap - but you left, and.” He stops abruptly, and Sam wants to stop him, but he continues after a moment - “I don’t know what you expect, anyhow,” he says, and barks out a quiet laugh, the sound small and embarrassed. “I’m a mess without you, is all.”

“But - but you left.” Sam takes a few clumsy steps, sits down heavily on the bed. “You kept, you kept leaving, kept leaving me behind,” and he can’t help the hurt still embedded in there every single time he came out of the bathroom or the gas station store or even just woke up and _Dean wasn’t there_ \- “Just - I thought you wanted me gone. I thought you wanted me to leave.”

Dean’s just staring at him, and Sam stares back, unsure of what to do. “I didn’t,” he says, finally, and then huffs. “I mean, seriously - when have I ever wanted you to leave, Sammy? Even - even when I acted like it. And - I didn’t want you to leave - I just, I just kept forgetting you were there, okay? Whatever Cas did to you, to _us_ \- whatever it was... I just kept - _keep_ \- forgetting you’re here. Keep thinking you’re in the Cage. And then when you left - I thought... I mean, you wanted your soul back, didn’t want to leave it...”

“I was possessing you, Dean!” Sam cuts in, incredulous. “All my soul or part of my soul, I was basically possessing you, pulling you away from Lisa, from Ben - making you - ”

“Whoa, whoa - wait, what the fuck?” Dean laughs, a nervous sound, “Possessing me? Pulling me away from Lisa?”

“You were fine before my soul somehow got loose and started... calling out to you,” Sam says, uncertainly. “Cas said you were getting better...”

For a moment, Dean’s expression is thunderous, and then he takes a look at Sam, and just stops. “Do you know how many days I was at Lisa’s, Sam?”

Sam tries to think back, calculates Hell days against Earth days in his head, but then Dean’s hand is suddenly on his arm, and the resulting comfort is still such a distinct novelty that his mental calculations fall apart completely. “Um - ”

“Thirteen days,” Dean says, and his hands are - for the first time - gentle on Sam, just. Being there. “Not even two weeks, Sammy. You pulled me away from nothing. Literally, too - you pulled me away from wasting away, from _killing myself_. I stopped talking five days after you were gone, couldn’t say a single word - not to _anyone_ , and seeing you back, in that filthy trailer you decided was a good place to hole up, your name was the first thing I’d said in half a year. I bound your soul to mine, Sam, _I_ did it - and if anyone is to blame here, it’s me, for taking your soul - ”

“‘I just wanted to bring you home,’” Sam says, abruptly, and Dean blinks. “It’s what you said, that day, I remember.” Dean’s face turns so completely red that if Sam could he would’ve laughed. Then the pieces click in place, and Sam doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “You thought I - Dean, did you think I thought your vessel wasn’t... _good enough_ for my soul?”

Dean doesn’t answer.

“I - fuck,” he says, and bends over, breathing heavily.

“Sammy,” Dean says somewhere above him, worriedly.

“I just. I just need a minute. Give me a minute,” he says, and flees from the one safe sanctuary he’s ever really had.

\---

Sam comes back half an hour later and Dean is still in the same exact spot he left him, maybe even the same position. His head jerks up at Sam’s entrance, and then his eyes well up so immediately a tear drops loudly on the carpet even before he slams them shut and looks away.

“Dean,” Sam says, softly, helplessly.

A few moments pass, and then - “Yeah,” quietly, gruffly, but Dean still doesn’t look up, doesn’t have his game face on, and his shoulders are heaving.

“Dean,” Sam says again, like it’s an anchor, like it’s drawing him tide to shore, and cautiously lays a hand on Dean’s shoulder, trying not to let the shudder that shakes through him at the touch startle Dean. “I’m sorry,” he apologises, contrite, small. “I’m. I should’ve told you when I’d be back.”

Dean shakes his head, takes a few breaths, and then a sound escapes him, softer than a moan, deeper than a whimper, and Sam feels his heart constrict painfully. Dean starts to move, starts to head towards the bathroom, but Sam takes a chance and snags him on his wrist, like he’s always done - like as a toddler trying to catch Dean’s attention, make Dean stay, and it does now, halting Dean in his first step. He sees it warring with the urge to hide until he can get his barriers back up, Dean wavering.

“ _Don’t_ -” he says, and he doesn’t know when it started, but he’s crying now too, and maybe that’s what tips the balance because Dean’s steering him to the bed, sitting him down, but then Sam can’t seem to make his hands let go of Dean, and eventually they end up on the bed together, Dean shushing him, him trying to wipe at Dean’s tears steadily streaming down his face and Dean somehow letting him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and then he can’t stop. It becomes a litany, _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_ \- and Dean’s fingers are on his lips when the words pitch into each other, wedge in his throat and mingle with his sobs and make him gag, pushing them back, keeping them from spilling out senselessly and uselessly, Dean’s hand is on his chest where it always hurts the worst, where at times he’s torn his skin off with his bare fingers, pressing and kneading and soothing, and it stupidly makes him sob even more, pull at Dean to make him closer, _closer_.

Dean just swallows and cries, and cries, tears falling from his eyes like they just can’t stop, and Sam keeps brushing them away, thumbs memorising Dean’s features. It’s intimate in a way they’ve never been before, sharing a motel room’s worth of space growing up, and yet in a way they’ve always been, Dean’s soul waiting for Sam’s four years before his little brother finally entered the world.

They fall asleep forehead to forehead, noses pushed right up next to each other, breaths puffing out warm and damp between them, and it’s the most restful sleep either of them has gotten in the past year.

\---

“Um,” Sam says, when he wakes up, because Death is sitting in the one chair in the room quietly drinking out of what appears to be a milkshake cup.

“Hello, Sam,” Death says, and Dean yelps, flails and hits Sam in his nose in the process.

“What the - ”

“Good evening to you too, Dean,” Death says, slurps milkshake out of his cup. “Two things,” he continues, “and then I’ll have to go. First - Sam’s soul is still in you. You don’t realise it, because you think it’s your own. Souls aren’t meant to share space - they mix like oil and water - that is, they _don’t_. And then... there are the exceptions.”

“Soulmates,” Sam says softly, and Death lifts an eyebrow.

“Good, Sam. Soulmates - because God got bored and decided to _experiment_ \- happen once every thousand years, and they are anomalies. Your souls don’t differentiate - for all intents and purposes, you are one soul in two bodies. So when Dean here decided to take your soul in, it worked - except now you can’t get your soul back.”

“There’s got to be - ”

“Shut up, Dean,” Death cuts in. “You got lucky that this is the worst that has happened - and wouldn’t even have, if not for the angel deciding to stir things up a little, distract you. People have ripped themselves apart - literally - using the blood magic you did - torn their eyes out with their bare hands, sometimes their lungs, sometimes their intestines. Hearts.” He pauses. “Now - there is a solution to all this. A permanent solution - and when I say permanent, I mean it. It lasts after Heaven, after Hell. And before you say just fix it, I want you to think about it. I can return you the soul you need to function, Sam, but it won’t be just yours. You’ll have Dean’s soul in you, and your soul will recognise it as your own. Everything will change. There is no going back from this, and it has never happened. Even I don’t know what could happen. Think about it. Figure it out.

“Second, whatever you choose, your fates cannot be separated - do me a favour, either die together or not at all.” He finishes the milkshake, stands, and walks out the door.

\---

“C’mon,” Dean says eventually, and gets off the bed, heads towards the door.

It’s like a magnet, and like twenty years ago when Dean would go and Sam would follow, and he’s up before he even knows it. “Where?” He asks, because throwback or not, he doesn’t know where this is leading.

“The car,” Dean replies, something like a grin in his voice, and something loosens in his chest even as he frowns in confusion at the familiar attitude in his big brother, cocky enough to almost be annoying, but somehow just weirdly reassuring right now. “Grab your jacket,” he adds, and that’s just ridiculous because it’s eighty degrees out, for goodness’ sake, but Sam still picks his jacket up, follows Dean. He blushes a furious shade of red when he almost walks into Dean who’s staring at the Chevy Bel Air sitting outside the motel room.

He opens his mouth to explain himself, to say it’s just something he saw and decided to take, to say he’s only had it for a day, anything to stop Dean from making fun of him. But Dean just gives a low whistle, turns to look at Sam, and his expression is gently understanding.

“You missed her too, huh?” He says quietly, and there’s an undercurrent of apology, because the Impala may have always been Dean’s, but it was also Sam’s home. Then - “Where are we, anyway?”

“Uh - Effingham, Illinois.”

Dean nods at the car. “You wanna drive? ‘pala’s at Carbondale.”

Sam does a double take, waiting for Dean to change his mind. Dean just looks on steadily at him, and somehow, with perhaps the most important decision of their lives hanging over them, he can’t dredge up a single bit of unrest, just wants to bask in his brother’s presence, enjoy it while it lasts - whether it’s just one more day or an entire eternity ahead of them. “Yeah,” he finally says. “Yeah, just let me - let me get my things.”

He tosses Dean the keys, heads back into the room, and returns with his duffel over his shoulder to find Dean in the passenger seat, Zeppelin playing in the background. Dean doesn’t even look up when he closes the door behind him and chucks the duffel into the backseat, just fiddles around with Sam’s iPod. Sam knows the moment Dean catches on to the theme of his entire iPod library, sees him swallow, his eyes flitting to Sam. “She wasn’t the only thing I missed,” Sam murmurs. A moment later, Dean’s arm comes up on the back of the seat, curls a palm around Sam’s neck.

It’s evening by the time they get to Carbondale. They drive through a fast food place, pick up dinner, and then Dean quietly directs Sam to the state park where the Impala was parked. Sam’s heart lurches a bit at the sight of the hunk of familiar black metal, sleek and beautiful and home. He doesn’t miss Dean’s soft chuckle at how he quickens his pace, grabs his bag and heads right to it.

Sam heads automatically for the passenger side, shaking his head at Dean’s silent question, and just drinks in the sight of his brother’s competent hands on the wheel, careful and tender in a way he’s never been with anything else but Sam.

“Take you to a place,” Dean says briefly, starts the Impala.

They pull into a clearing just as dusk falls. Sam doesn’t know how Dean does it, has a map to every nook and cranny on America’s roads in his head to rival Sam’s memory. It’s intuitive to Sam’s reason, visceral to Sam’s cerebral, but Dean never fails to find an abandoned building to hole up when they need to disappear, a cabin somewhere to rest when they sorely need a break - or, in this case, a clearing to watch the stars, something they’d started before Sam could remember - something they’d done the night before he’d gone up against Lucifer, knowing they would never see each other again.

Clambering up onto the hood of the Impala, he shivers a little at the thought, and starts when the army blanket they keep in the trunk hits his shoulder and drops into his lap. He shoots Dean a grateful look and receives an eye roll in return, but the corners of Dean’s lip tug up a little as he drops the cooler onto the ground beside them and joins Sam on the hood. They sit reclined on the windshield, arms pressed up against each other, boots leaving dusty marks on her hood as they pull their legs up, and those are the only marks Dean will allow on her.

They don’t speak. But under starlight, they have always understood each other, and they have never needed words to love.


	5. and I am the bones to burn to set us free

Nothing really changes after that, and yet everything does. For the first time in years, the open road is exhilarating. It’s a throwback to an era sepia-toned with age, a remix of their childhood. They laugh and banter and fight across the country, and their home is as much the open road as the Impala, and more than either, each other. They share beds and sometimes after gruelling hunts, showers. The intimacy of the soul-bond makes it difficult if not downright impossible to conceal things from each other, which is sometimes good, and other times inconvenient. Soulmate or not, they’re damaged goods, and a lifetime of emotional baggage doesn’t just disappear overnight with a spell.

In Indiana, Dean stares a little too long at a brunette and her kid while he’s getting lunch and returns to the car to Sam completely shut off from him. It’s not the first time Sam’s voiced... _concerns_ , wanting Dean to rethink his choices, nor the last, probably, and he knows Sam just wants him to be happy, but it never fails to feel like rejection, like impending abandonment. “What the fuck,” is what he says when they get to the motel room and he still doesn’t feel a single bit of Sam. And he really can’t be blamed for being a little agitated - he remembers forgetting Sam all too well, and this always feels a bit too much like that.

Sam doesn’t say a word, and Dean suddenly feels the urge to bloody his brother’s lips, because _fuck this_ \- he’s allowed to miss Lisa and Ben when they’re half a fucking hour away from where they live and still not regret his decision or love Sam any less. And if Sam weren’t a complete fuckwit he would realise that.

Sam still doesn’t say anything, and anger turns quickly to desperation - if he could just _touch_ Sam it’d all be solved, except Sam hates being touched when he’s like that, flinches and jerks away and that’s just more crap to add onto Dean's pile. “Fuck, Sam - give me something here,” he says, almost begging, and then - Sam puts out a hand, lets Dean snatch it up in a bruising grip.

The sheer relief eclipses Sam’s emotions for a moment, but then he feels it all - uncertainty, insecurity, worry, guilt - “I don’t... You wanted that,” Sam says. “I know you wanted it, and you deserve it, and I’m not -” He’s flayed open and Dean doesn’t know if he’ll ever be used to this, to feeling exactly how much his brother _needs_ him and fears that need.

“You’re right,” he says, continues before the flare of hurt can blossom into anything more. He grips tighter at Sam’s hand that’s trying to pull away, “You’re not Lisa and Ben. You’re my little brother. You’re - you’re Sam, you’re _Sammy_ , and - I fucking left them for a chance of finding you, I pulled you out of Hell myself - I don’t... You’re just, you’re _it_ for me, okay? Forever and ever and until the sun turns black and a fucking eternity, whatever - I made my choice. It’s not in the cards for me, and I don’t want it to be.” He takes a breath, decides, fuck it, and - “I’ve got all I need right here.” Then he lets go, because Sam isn’t trying to block him out anymore and all this hand-holding makes him feel like a girl.

For a moment it seems like what he said wasn’t enough, and he doesn’t know what else Sam needs, but then Sam looks up at him - “You do, huh?” Amusement tugging at the thread between them. “I think you left our lunch in the car, dude.”

It comes so out of left field that Dean can’t help his incredulous expression. It morphs into his own brand of bitchface a moment later as he rolls his eyes, gives Sam the finger before walking out to grab the soggy paper bag from the car.

\---

Dean’s thigh gets ripped open by a poltergeist in Ohio, and Sam feels the echo distinctly in his own leg, which means it’s got to hurt like fuck for Dean. He jams the last bag into the wall, doesn’t wait to see if it worked, and skids to a stop where Dean is clutching at his leg on the floor. “Dean,” he says, worriedly, but the son of a bitch just rolls his eyes and starts pushing himself up, leaving him nothing to do but help.

They’re filthy from where the poltergeist popped a pipe and shot them with some putrid unknown liquid. Sam isn’t taking any chances, just pushes Dean into the shower stall and climbs in right after him. It’s not the first time they’ve shared a shower, and it’s not like they really look at each other when they do, but Dean’s thigh is washing red liquid down the drain and Sam just can’t help but stare, because God, how is he even _standing_ \- and then -

“What’s that?” He says, and his voice is the wrong tone, strident and almost frantic, but what the fuck is that, and he can’t tear his eyes away from it, not even when he feels Dean’s embarrassment along with a side of annoyance feed through the line.

“Nothing,” Dean says, quickly, starts to move past him, but he grabs onto Dean, and short of barreling over Sam Dean really has no option but to stay. He seems to realise it, huffing an unhappy, impatient breath but letting Sam push him back so he can stare at the marks on his skin.

“Is that my name?” He whispers when he finally gets a good look, lifts his eyes up to Dean’s, horrified.

Dean just rolls his eyes and nods pointedly at the still-healing scars on Sam’s torso and stomach. “Stop making a big deal out of this, princess,” he says. “You have yours too, and have I said a single word about it? Live and let live, Sammy - ”

“You _carved_ my name into your skin, Dean,” Sam whispers, “I just - it’s - ”

“What? It’s what - different? Like you didn’t mean it to hurt or you didn’t need the pain? Don’t try to bullshit me, Sam - I know - ”

“It’s my _name_ , Dean!”

There must be something in Sam’s face or his voice though, because Dean sighs, but softens. “I just needed a reminder, okay?” He says quietly. “It helped.”

Sam swallows audibly. “I didn’t want you to - You didn’t have to - ”

“Yeah I did,” Dean says. “It was the only thing that worked, and even then...”

Sam shakes his head. “I - don’t do it again, okay? I don’t want you to do it again,” he says, and he knows he should sound authoritative, tell Dean it’s not okay to just carve into your own flesh when you can’t remember, but he just feels like a kid, and maybe that’s for the better, because Dean looks at him a moment, then nods.

“You too,” he says shortly, reaches out a hand to rub gently, briefly at Sam’s chest where he doesn’t even want to touch himself, the skin so mangled and criss-crossed with raised scars on top of burns it makes his stomach roil when he looks at it or touches it. But Dean just - touches it all the time casually, like it doesn’t disgust him or something, just puts a hand on it when they’re sleeping, reaches over to pat it in reassurance randomly, and it feels - it feels like sanctification. Absolution.

\---

It starts in Missouri, because Sam just couldn’t help it. It was _right there_ , right in front of him, dangling enticingly, and he just had to. The backlash - the warm splatter of coffee all over his front and on his face - is every bit worth the expression on Dean’s face - incredulous and flabbergasted and just thoroughly, thoroughly _done_. He laughs until his stomach hurts from something other than fingernail marks, unable to stop - and evidently Dean can’t help it either, reluctant grin tugging on his lips mirroring Sam’s unrepentant one, affection blatant in his eyes as he looks at Sam laughing. It’s a good day, because neither of their grins leave their faces even as they finish breakfast and walk to the car. “I can’t believe you _actually_ put salt in my coffee, bitch,” Dean grouses half an hour later. “Real mature.” Sam just laughs.

In Arkansas they’re working a case. Sam opens his laptop to ask a librarian something he’s researching, turns promptly red. Dean just laughs and laughs and laughs off to the side as Sam slams the laptop shut, mutters something probably incoherent to the scandalised librarian, and marches over to Dean. “You’re a _jerk_ ,” he says succinctly, and Dean doesn’t even stop laughing, just grabs Sam’s arm and tries to lead him out of the library, not even the least bit hurt when Sam crabbily pulls away, glaring heatedly at Dean. It might have something to do with how he immediately returns to Dean’s side, like magnet to magnet, and Dean, who can read Sam more fluently than English, sees the grudging amusement in the set of his lips.

“Payback’s a bitch... _bitch_.” Sam just rolls his eyes, pressing down on the power button until BustyAsianBeauties.com isn’t frozen on his screen, and starts plotting how to get back at Dean.

And that’s how it starts.

It lasts for one entire month, a record even for bored boys travelling on an endless road trip, too much time on their hands and a father who drills them on hand-to-hand fighting and sends them on three-mile runs up and down the hill in the storm, but just rolls his eyes when his sons’ pranks get actually, truly _out of hand_.

They prank and laugh their way across the country. In New Mexico Sam painstakingly puts glue between the teeth of Dean’s comb. In New Jersey Dean puts toothpaste in Sam’s oreos. In Seattle Sam redecorates the Impala, and in California Dean does the same to Sam’s laptop.

\---

The laughter stops in Milwaukee.

Dean’s in line for Cheetos, M&M’s and a stick of strong glue when he feels it. He doesn’t even think, just dashes out of the store, the alarm beeping behind him from the goods he’s just basically robbed. He already knows there’s going to be no one in the motel room when he bursts in through the door, but fuck, for once, could they just have a fucking break? He gives the room a once-over and when he realises who’s taken Sam, cold fury settles over him, taking away the desperate edge to his movements. There’s even a part of him that likes this, settling in for the hunt, predator to the prey who’ve taken his little brother.

He tracks them with the single-minded focus of finding Sam the first time round, pushing down the waves of irrational grief and panic at their separation, concentrating on the thread between them. He doesn’t reopen the scars on his thigh, but takes a lesson from Sam, drawing his baby brother’s name in his flesh with his fingernails, renewing each mark whenever he starts to wonder if Sam really is back from the Cage.

It isn’t difficult to find them. For hunters, they range from amateurs to professionals, Dean critically looking over the trail they leave behind, John’s snarky criticisms playing in the back of his mind, but clearly none of them have been trained by a Marine, and they don’t have the instincts a Winchester has, ingrained through years of elite training.

By the end of the day, he’s staking out the grounds where the abandoned warehouse (why always abandoned warehouses? Have a little creativity, good grief) is located. Where _Sam_ is located. It turns out little brother is giving as good as he’s getting, volleying back and forth with snarky insults that make his captors look even more like buffoons than usual - which isn’t even the main act, serving only as distraction for how he’s somehow gotten a piece of wire and is currently working discreetly to get himself free. Still, he’s sporting a black eye and there’s a patch of wet on his leg that’s making Dean’s blood boil.

Sam is good, Dean thinks, as he watches his brother not even reacting the tiniest bit at the bird whistle he sounds out, a signal they’ve used on rare occasions. In fact, that’s the only thing that gives him away - and only to Dean - that he’s heard it and knows that help - that _big brother_ is coming. There are ten of them against two, counting Sam, who is hurt but evidently good to go, and much as he wants to make them have a taste of their own medicine, it’s not his priority. He wants - _needs_ to get Sam out of there, not strung up like a piece of meat for those twisted fuckers to torture and play with.

Mind - and plan - made up, he reaches into his boot, and throws the first knife, embedding it in the back of the guy nearest to Sam, then aims and shoots, two clean shots to the chest, before everything descends into chaos. It’s vaguely unsatisfying, how they just scatter and run away then, especially when it’s odds of _ten against two_ , Wusses. But they get out of there, Sam leaning against Dean, limping to the Impala. He looks bad close up, exhausted and hurt.

“I’ve got you,” he says, rubbing a hand over Sam’s neck, relief washing over him as adrenaline fades.

Sam just closes his eyes and tips forward into Dean’s shoulder, where he stays as Dean starts the car, hands buried in Dean’s shirt underneath his jacket, and Dean lets him. As they turn into the motel parking lot, Sam reaches behind him to peer at the stick of glue left on his seat, grins loopily and says, “Gotcha.”

Dean laughs, a bleak, somewhat hysterical sound, drops the facade, and pulls Sam into him.

\---

“I’m hunting them down,” Dean announces when he wakes up in the morning.

Sam squints at him. “What, just like that?”

“Dude, they took you, _twice_ \- what more do you want?”

Sam looks a little embarrassed, a little surprised, two parts worried to one part pleased, then scrunches his face and goes back to stirring his coffee. As far as abductions go, it’s ranked fairly low on the traumatic scale, bouncing back nearly immediately afterwards. He shrugs. “They think they’re doing the right thing,” he says, and Dean shoots him such an incredulous look he almost rethinks what he just said.

“You’re kidding, right? In what world is _feeding you demon blood_ the ‘right thing’?”

Sam flinches, then shrugs, finishes his coffee and stands up. “I’m going out,” he says, and Dean almost wants to shoot himself and Sam and then everybody else.

“That’s not - that’s not what I meant, Sam,” he says, and Sam stops.

“Yeah,” he finally says, hand dropping from the doorjamb. “I know. It’s just - ” He laughs a little. “Sounds like the kind of thing I’d do, not so much you.”

Dean looks affronted. A little hurt. “What, _protecting you_? Sam - ”

“No,” he rushes out, “not - ” Breaks off. “I just - you don’t hunt people down, that’s not what you do. You save people, you don’t kill them.”

“Have killed plenty before,” Dean lobs back, flippantly. Then, softer - “Dude, they’re going to come after you again and again and they’re going to get new people to believe whatever bullshit they’ve been trying to sell.”

“They think they’re doing the right thing,” Sam says, again, stubbornly, and Dean doesn’t even know why he’s so set on defending the sons of bitches that have made for some of his worst days, Hell notwithstanding.

“Well, they’re not,” he retorts. “They’re going to find that out soon enough.” He hefts his Colt, tucks it behind him.

“That what you’re going to do to me if I make a mistake again?” Sam says, and Dean suddenly gets it. And not at all too, because what the fuck, why would Sam even - ?

He crosses the few feet between them. “Never,” he says resolutely, waits until Sam raises eyes to him. “I mean it - never. You go down, we go down together.”

Sam smiles bleakly. “That’s what I’m afraid of, Dean. I keep - I keep fucking things up. No matter what I do - save the world, don’t save the world, try to save _you_ , fail to save you - I just... I just keep fucking things up. And somewhere along the line you stopped trying to stop me, but you’re - you’re good, you’re supposed to be good, and I’m just dragging you down with me into my muck, and you fucking let me. You just. You fucking. Let me. And I’m supposed to - ”

“You’re supposed to let _me_ ,” Dean says, presses a hand on Sam’s chest, frowns when Sam blanches and steps away. “Sammy...”

“You keep touching me there - like it doesn’t... like it doesn’t disgust you...”

“Because it doesn’t,” Dean shoots back immediately. “Dude. Look,” pushes his sleeve up his arm, exposes flesh permanently carved with Sam’s name. “You’re not disgusted by that either. All that - ” he motions to Sam’s torso, “That’s just... more you. That’s my kid brother sacrificing himself to save the world. That’s my little brother hurting, that’s my brother needing me. Wanting me back. How could I be disgusted by that?”

“You’re _supposed_ to,” Sam says, doggedly, and Dean remembers it from when Sammy was three and insisted that Dean not buy any more animal crackers because then the animals would die, crushed in their mouths, even after Dean had explained they weren’t _really_ animals, or really alive, for that matter. And then a month after that when Sam had been convinced eggs and ham could only be eaten if they were green, and Dean had had to take what little pocket money he had to buy a small bottle of green colouring until he’d grown out of it. And then a week later, and a year later, and a decade later.

“No, I’m not,” Dean says easily. “You’re mine to take care of. Nothing - not even you and your big dumb head with its big dumb ideas - is going to take that away from me.”

Sam just frowns at him. “ _You’re_ dumb,” he finally says, grumpily.

“Yeah, whatever.” Dean turns away. “Now - are we good? We gonna go get those suckers or what?”

Sam grimaces.

“Look at it this way,” Dean says, starting to pack up. “If they’re stupid enough to think you’re a danger, they’re stupid enough to endanger all the innocent people on earth and we’re going to stop it before they do anymore harm. I, on the other hand,” he turns and smiles, big and happy, “I’m going to enjoy nailing them for putting my brother through all the crap he never deserved.”

He should probably find it disturbing, Sam thinks, picking up his jacket and duffel, Dean saying that with the expression of an ecstatic five-year-old, but all he sees is his big brother, protecting him. “I’m going to drag you down to Hell with me,” Sam says soberly.

“Yeah, the other way round too, and we’re going to wreck Hell together - but not now, okay? Now we’re going to wreck those bastards who missed the memo never to touch Sam Winchester.”

\---

They split up, because they have some sense of self-preservation. Roy is in a nameless small town in Alabama shoving eggs down his throat when Dean fucking Winchester slides into the seat across from him in the booth, grinning at him all teeth, creepy as fuck. His first reaction is to get the fuck out of there, knees banging the table before him as he tries to rise, but there’s a pressure on his shoulder and that’s just ridiculous, Dean isn’t even moving - until he looks up. And up. And up.

“Hi, Roy.”

“ _Fuck_!” And then they both laugh. “Look - Sam - Dean - ” Because he doesn’t even know which one of them is more balanced right now - “We can talk this over.”

“Oh yeah, sure,” Sam acquiesces readily, and Roy’s hand starts creeping to his jacket surreptitiously. It stops halfway, held in Sam’s iron grip. “Like we did when I came back from Hell, right? Oh wait.”

“You boys don’t wanna do this,” he says, hating the shaking in his voice. “I’ve got buddies - ”

“I know,” Dean says, gently. “We’re getting to them next. But first we want to finish you off.”

He feels more than sees Sam’s indecision at that, turns to him. “Look, Sam - we started off on the wrong foot - ” The coldness of steel nudges at his throat, turning him back to face Dean.

“Eyes on me, off Sam,” he says. “You don’t get to speak to him unless he talks to you.” A pause, because Roy doesn’t have anything to say to _Dean_ except _don’t kill me_ , because right now he looks like he’ll first torture and then kill him. “We’re going to walk out of here, calmly. Nobody has to get hurt. Well, except you - but we’ll salt and burn you. Don’t worry.”

“Fuck, fuck fuck - ”

“Shh.” He feels the bead of red slide down his throat. “We’ll make it quick if you make it easy.”

They walk out of the diner without Roy even feeling his legs at all during the short trip out to the back.

“Hey, Sammy,” warm - affectionate, and Roy entertains a hope to get out of this alive briefly - “Go wait in the car, alright? I’ll be back in a moment.” And then Dean Winchester’s voice - “You should’ve learned never to touch my brother, Roy. Didn’t I say - kill me, but when I come back I’ll be pissed? Well - you’ve got me pissed, pal. And here’s what.” The bite of steel, slower than a bullet. “Is it that difficult? Just - _don’t. touch. Sammy._ ” Roy fancies it’s anguish he’s hearing in Dean’s voice before he can’t hear anything anymore, and then he doesn’t even feel anything anymore.

\---

They’re working a case in Arizona, something that reeks of angel and Sam is more skittish than usual. Dean can’t blame him - Castiel did a number on - well, both of them, to be sure, but he’d taken advantage of Sam’s insecurities, his grogginess, and flat-out lied to him, manipulated him just like his brothers before him had. Still, he doesn’t expect it to come full-circle quite as quickly as it does. One moment he’s in the mental hospital, staking out the place, and the next he hears the flutter of wings and he’s in a basement of sorts, the trench-coated figure in front of him familiar, making his fists itch for a fight. He feels Sam’s frantic worry escalate, and then tamped down so hard he thinks Sam might have literally hurt himself in the process.

“Hello, Dean.” Castiel says, and what humanness he’s gained in that year with Sam and Dean, it’s gone, evident in the cold otherworldliness in his expression. Dean barely even cares, just wants to bloody his fists with Cas’s face. Or the other way round. Whatever.

“You know Sam’s going to make your life a living Hell after what you did to him, right? To us?”

Castiel just smiles, and God, he hates that arrogant son of a bitch. “He’s just a _boy_ , what can he do? I have a legion behind me. Anything you try - you’ll run for the rest of your lives.” He pauses. “I might have... miscalculated your consuming need for each other, and the sickening propensity you have for getting back together. Still, it bought me some time.”

“Yeah, well, watch what happened when your big brothers underestimated us. Underestimated Sam. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, Cas.”

Cas seems mildly disturbed by that for a brief moment, then smiles again. “I think it’s you who doesn’t know who you’re dealing with, Dean.” Dean barely has a second to contemplate what that might mean when Cas closes his fist, and it’s like Hell all over again, supernatural pain spreading through every cell in his body, burning, burning, burning.

\---

Whatever reticence Sam previously harboured towards the case, it vanishes the moment he feels the thread strain between them. They don’t talk about it, alongside with a dozen other things that came along with the soul bond they don’t talk about - but he feels every bit of Dean’s physical distance every time they separate on a hunt, and even if Dean doesn’t feel particularly rattled by the sudden stretch in the thread between them, he _knows_ , just _knows_ that Dean has been taken. He also has a fairly good idea of who it was that took Dean, and the urge to kill, the urge to make his abductor feel every bit of pain he physically can, only heightens when he feels the sudden burst of pain from Dean’s end of the thread - and it doesn’t stop.

Rage fuels him, and he lets it - bubbling and frothing and stopped only by a dam, ready to burst forth in a split second’s notice. Underneath it - grief so piercing only Dean’s words are stopping him from digging his fingers right into his stomach to start gouging, because he’s not _ready_ , he’s not fucking _ready_ for this, and Castiel should know better than to try to take his brother away from him not once but twice.

It doesn’t take long for him to finish figuring out how many angels are in the region working under Cas - if there’s anything that’s the angel’s downfall, it’s his arrogance. He thought sundering them was a good idea, and maybe Sam would have let that go eventually, because having Dean there, that’s what matters, he’s learned that. But for whatever asinine reason Cas has, he’s _taken Dean away again_ , and a small part of him even shivers at the coldness of his rage.

 _C’mon, Sammy - put that big brain of yours to use,_ Dean’s voice in his head, and he does. Sam draws each and every single one of his prey out, paints invisible sigils he’s learned in his time with two archangels sometimes bored of even torture, blocks out any and every single distress call on the angel radio, and watches himself kill four of them, the ones working closest to Cas as far as he can tell. It’s a dangerous dance, he knows, looking down at the charred shadows of wings on the ground, stained with blood. But so is taking Dean from Sam, and there are a fair number of monsters gone to wherever monsters go to when they die - that know better than to bet against a Winchester.

Finding Dean isn’t even the problem - every single cell in him wants to burst him and take his brother, hide him away fucking forever so nobody can ever take him away from Sam again, but the angels he’s taken out are only foot soldiers, and he already has a bleeding gash to add to the collection on his torso. One on his back, and a few other internal injuries, because angels don’t fight fair. Cas is a general. From what he can tell, a seraph too, and he doesn’t hold high hopes of simply going in and stopping Cas just like that.

So he plans. Carves sigils into his skin - the same ones Cas probably erased from his ribcage when he lied to Sam - and tries not to dig too deep or relish the pain too much. Dean probably wouldn’t approve either way, but at least Sam can say that he tried his best to stop. Patiently, _patiently_ draws sigils around the house Cas has Dean in. Unfortunately, he’s in the basement, and short of going in through the house itself, Sam can’t do anything about that. He can only place his hope in Cas’s greed, that he wants to ensnare Sam as well. He knows Dean feels his proximity, won’t give him away, but his heart still pounds in his chest painfully as he lies in wait, trap set.

The plan doesn’t go quite according to plan, of course, because the Winchester bad luck is only part of their charm - the holy oil only getting half of Cas and the flames not quite spreading as much as he would like. Half of him is outside of the circle of holy fire, but for some reason in his rage Cas steps into instead of outside of it.

“You don’t know who you’re messing with, boy,” Cas’s voice, except bigger, thunderous, and his wings are spreading. Sam is just waiting for the cue, aims and shoots. It lodges inside his head, Sam can see - no exit wound - the black hole only smokes, but it’s marked with sigils, carved into the bullet. Cas is a little slower. “You think you can _shoot_ an angel of the Lord?” He says, raises his hand, and - nothing happens.

Sam just stares at him. “You don’t take Dean, you hear?” He says, and he knows it should be quieter, deadlier, like Dean goes when someone threatens Sam, but he can’t, he just _can’t_ \- he can’t lose Dean again and he’s terrified and desperate and - “You don’t. fucking. take Dean away from me.” And then he sinks the blade into Cas’s chest.

He watches for a long time then, just stands and stares at the flames, at the shadows of Cas’s wings, at the destruction he brings with him.

Until -

“Sammy,” soft, weak - too soft, too quiet, that Sam wouldn’t have heard it without the bond.

Oh, God.

He tumbles more than rushes down the stairs, lethal grace all forgotten in his haste to get to Dean. He doesn’t dare to touch more than he has to - not only because Dean is probably too sore to touch, but because he can’t, he can’t let it stain him, let the darkness touch him.

Dean doesn’t seem to have his qualms, reaches out and pats Sam down, checks for injuries, brows furrowing when Sam doesn’t even flinch as his fingers come away wet, red-tinged. “Sammy...”

“We’re getting out of here,” Sam says, and they do.

\---

Dean barely stays awake on the way back to the motel, doesn’t grouse about Sam’s driving, but he keeps casting long looks at Sam. It feels almost like when Sam was drinking demon blood behind Dean’s back, like Dean’s somehow decided he’s a freak. He can’t. He just hunches deeper into himself, and drives on.

Sam patches Dean up efficiently, gently. Dean lets him take care of his own wounds when he tells Dean to go to sleep and refuses to let Dean look at them, and he doesn’t know if he’s grateful or upset about it. It feels like - like he’s not even really himself anymore, and he doesn’t even understand why - Dean was the one who got taken. Three whole days, tortured for no good reason by a sadistic former-friend-turned-enemy. He doesn’t even know for sure what Cas was working towards.

He stumbles into their bed after cleaning up the gashes he can reach and ignoring whatever he can’t, facing away from Dean. Dean doesn’t reach out to him.

\---

It’s five days later, which feels like an eternity, that Dean slams the mug onto the coffee table, ignoring the liquid sloshing out. Sam looks up, a little startled.

“That’s it,” he growls. “What the fuck crawled up your ass, Sam?”

He blinks. “What?”

“Don’t even pretend with me - you _know_ what. You’ve been shying away every single time I’ve tried to touch you. You stay in the car just not to be in the motel room with me. What is it - you finally decided this soul thing isn’t going to work? You’re gonna walk out on me, Sam? Because let me tell you - this - ” he gestures between them - “This isn’t much better.”

He just stares at Dean, trying to decode what Dean is trying to say, because it’s - he doesn’t... Is Dean - is Dean _kicking him out_?

“Fuck, don’t give me that kicked puppy look. I was gone for three days - three - and somehow in those three days I lost some... what, brother status so I can’t touch you anymore? And don’t even pretend you don’t need it - I fucking _live_ with you, dude, I see you. So - ” he breaks off. Quieter - “So tell me what’s going on.”

Dean wants to know what’s going on. He doesn’t... The laugh that bubbles from his lips is manic, hysterical, and he can’t stop it.

“Sam!” Barked, harsh. “Settle down.”

He does, a Pavlovian response more than anything, ingrained through years of training. Dean’s asking Sam what’s going on. He doesn’t even know himself. Doesn’t know why Dean’s touch feels like too much, when it’s all he needs - needs Dean like he’s starving and dying of thirst, and the only thing that soothes the hunger is Dean’s frame in his arms and Dean’s arms around him, Dean’s laughter and his stupid huge green eyes, his sour morning breath, his amulet pressing into Sam’s chest, fitting into the grooves of his skin like coming home.

“Sammy.” Dean’s closer now. He feels it in the thread, in the heat of Dean’s body, and Sam is so cold, so fucking cold. “Hey, buddy.” He almost snorts at how Dean is talking to him like he’s five, although - “I scared you, huh?”

Fucking understatement. He buries his face in his hands, feeling like the entire world is crumbling apart around him, not knowing why. “I don’t...”

“Shh,” Dean shushes, really like he’s five, and then hugs him.

“I don’t wanna be a monster,” he says, muffled in Dean’s neck, because he doesn’t know where to start.

“You’re not,” Dean replies easily, like there’s no question about it.

“You didn’t see me. You didn’t see me when I - ”

“ _You_ saw _me_ ,” Dean interrupts. “When I was hunting down all of those hunters to kill them. Cold-blooded. Execution-style.” His voice cracks, a little, and Sam frowns, tries to pull back, because he doesn’t... “You think I’m a monster, Sam?”

“Never,” he says, doesn’t even have to think about it.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Neither are you. You saved me, little brother.” Dean turns his head slightly, and Sam thinks he feels a kiss pressed into his hair, wisely doesn’t say anything about it. “You did good, Sammy.” He pulls away then, grins a little at Sam, pride - not fear - in his eyes. “Fucking badass, man - you killed four angels and _then_ Cas?”

“Yeah, well.” Feels pleased, embarrassed heat creep up his neck. “They were dicks.”

Dean smiles then. “Yeah, they were.”

\---

“Heard Creedy’s dead,” Bobby’s voice comes over the phone, unreadable.

“Really,” Dean says blandly. Sam elbows him half-heartedly, because on one hand - _dude_ , at least actually try to sound marginally convincing that you’re surprised. But on the other - why even bother? Nobody except his brother stepped in, came for him when he was on the other end of the barrel, and honestly, he doesn’t really care about what anyone except Dean thinks anymore.

“Yeah,” Bobby continues. “Roy too - some other hunters as well - all stabbed in the heart.” Sam looks at Dean then, because Dean never let him see any of the actual killings. He never really wanted to, not at that time anyway. Not much at all even now. “Clean wound, looks like an expert hand.”

“Huh,” Dean says noncommittally, still not giving an inch. “They say who they suspect?”

“You gonna tell me the truth if I tell you?” The big guns now.

“Depends,” Dean says, and there’s a hardness, a frigidness in his voice that doesn’t, Sam thinks, have anything to do with the topic at hand. “Whose side are you on?” And that’s just - weird, because Bobby’s always been on their side, stepped in as surrogate father when Dad had died.

There’s a pause, then Bobby swears. “You’re an idjit,” he says heatedly. “I’ve always been on your side, yours and Sam’s. I didn’t insist on helping you find Sam because you wanted to do it alone, not because I wasn’t tracking every contact I had out there. You could’ve asked if you wanted me around, even if you didn’t have a voice - you could’ve written something down - ”

“Bobby - ”

“... Sam’s there, isn’t he?”

Dean shrugs. Sam leans over. “Hi, Bobby.”

“Good to hear from you too, Sam,” Bobby says grouchily, and they both shoot each other guilty looks. “Listen - they’re on the lookout. A few of them won’t be able to do much harm to you, but you never know - some of them just want to find reasons to screw you over. You boys be careful, and swing by when you get the chance.”

“Yeah, Bobby,” Sam says, because Dean doesn’t seem inclined to say anything.

“Good,” Bobby says, and hangs up.

Sam turns to look at Dean. “You didn’t have a voice?”

Dean shrugs, again. “Not the first time,” he says.

“You said my name was the first thing you said,” Sam presses.

Dean stares at him, stonily, _duh_ obvious on his face.

Sam ponders it for a moment, then starts grinning.

Dean takes a look at Sam, then rolls his eyes. “Shut up,” he says, testily.

Sam just laughs, and can’t stop. “You love me,” he crows, grin not flagging a bit when Dean reaches a hand over and swats him on the head.

“Who could love a little bitch like you,” Dean mutters, but there’s a smile in his voice.

\---

They drive for days, from hunt to hunt, dusty highways and seedy motels, rediscovering the road that is their home. They drive, classic rock blaring from the Impala’s speakers, Sam’s voice laughingly joining in the off-key singing, wind in their hair and sun in their eyes, boys like they were and have always been. And then Dean says, _let’s go see the Grand Canyon_.

And Sam says, _yeah, let’s._

Five hundred days after Sam falls into a hole, Dean sees the Grand Canyon for the first time. It’s good.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for 'If love sits on your heart like stone'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4137591) by [stormbrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormbrite/pseuds/stormbrite)




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